we can require all gun purchasers to submit a background check, whether or not they go through private sellers or federally licensed firearms dealers, so that those who are prohibited remain prohibited. they don't get those firearms. we can also incentivize states to automate common due to domestic violence, to do a national background check system. so when they do go, to the federally licensed firearms dealers, the dealers have complete, accurate, and up-to-date information to determine whether or not they are disqualified. ..

>> to include former and dating relationships. as i said, the share of intimate partner homicides committed by current dating partners is increasing, and we don't have good data on the number of intimate partner homicides are committed by former intimate partners. however, given that separation is a very dangerous time, we can assume that quite a few of them are happening. but we can also extend federal gun prohibitions to convict those of misdemeanor stalking. stalking is an important risk, but many misdemeanor stalking laws do not include as an element the use or attempted use of physical force or threat with a deadly weapon. therefore, they are not included under the federal gun bans. if we change the laws, if we

expanded the laws to cover these three groups of people, we may be able to effect an even greater decrease in intimate partner homicide. but enforcement is a big issue here. implementation and enforcement. these laws stand or fall on how they are implemented and enforced. so we could provide the resources and support needed for states and local systems to implement and enforce these laws. possibly a training center where jurisdictions that have gotten it down, they're better at this, can train other jurisdictions on how to do it, on how to have police officers go into the home of somebody who's newly-prohibited and gather those firearms that they know they have. if we enforce these laws along with including more people, more dangerous individuals under the categories that are covered, public safety can be increased, and the risk to intimates can be

reduced. thanks. [applause] >> thank you, april. um, i'm going to give our next presentation, and on the topic of reor considering our current -- reoccurring our current conditions for legal firearm ownership. the lead author on this paper is kate viddes, and my other co-author is john burnic cnchts many times in discussing gun policy it seems as though it gets really dumbed down into an assumption that really doesn't make sense or is true. we have on the one hand a set of hardened criminals, right? these are the bad guys with guns, and they're all supposed to be prohibited from being able to purchase or possess a

firearm. on the other hand, we have your law-abiding gun owner. and sort of not much in between there. but what i hope to do today is impress upon you that the world isn't necessarily as neat as these little boxes in our gun policy, and if we're going to have the biggest impact in this reducing homicide and other violence, we have to really reconsider what our -- how well our prohibitions are doing in identifying the highest risk individuals. very briefly, and professor cook covered this already so i'll just try to be quick, the federal firearm prohibitions for firearms include, of course, felons, fugitives from justice as april just described, domestic violence restrictions. as was discussed earlier in detail, the restrictions for those who are seriously mentally

ill. those who have been dishonorably discharged from the armed forces, illegal aliens. and perhaps most importantly in order to possess handguns, you're supposed to be at least 18 years of age. separately, if you're going to purchase a handgun from a licensed firearm dealer, you have to be at least 21 years of age. and then finally, in federal law those who are identified as addicted or users of controlled substances. as far as how this gets operationalized, at least the last component with users of controlled sub standses, the regulations -- substances say the regulations say you can be prohibited if you've been convictioned for use or had an arrest in the past five years if most recent has been in the past

year. or, and this applied to jared loughner in the tucson shooting, you've been found through a drug test to have used a controlled substance unlawfully. so, um, my colleagues and i recently published a study that looked at gun offenders who are in state prisons. and we wanted to look at the 13 states whose laws with respect to who can and cannot legally possess firearms pretty much mirrored the federal laws or in, i think, maybe a couple of cases may have been weaker. so in these states, in these 13 states we found in this black portion of the pie chart 40% were prohibited from being able to possess a firearm. so that leaves 60% of individuals committing gun violence who previously were not

prohibited. um, roughly equal portions of the remainder of that involved a set of individuals who wouldn't have been prohibited under any kind of set of restrictions currently under law in any of the 50 states. however, what's most interesting, i think, and what we try to probe is this 29% who would have been prohibited had these 13 states applied the more stricter standards that are in place in states with stricter gun laws. particularly interesting is sort of how this broke down within that overall 29% of gun offenders in these states. um, the most -- the biggest portion of in this were individuals who were in this 18-20-year-old age range so that, um, had the minimum age for possession been 21, they

would have been prohibited. so around 17% fell under that category. about 7%, um, were users of long guns in that younger age group. roughly 5% had been convicted of a serious crime in juvenile court, something that would have been if an adult court considered a felony. and then around 4% had been convicted of a violent or gun crime that would have been a misdemeanor crime. and then a little less than 2% would have been disqualified because they had been convicted of two or more drug or alcohol-related misdemeanors. is so, um, using these data we wanted to think about our additional exclusion criteria justifiable. top of the list, again, sort of

based on the data might be b whether we should shed 21 as the minimum -- we should set 21 as the minimum age for possessing handguns. other criteria would be misdemeanors involving violence or guns x if you'd been convicted -- i use convicted in courts because that's not the terminology they use in juvenile court, but basically found to have committed a serious crime within juvenile court or had multiple convictions for drug or alcohol crimes, so i just want to briefly go over a little bit of data that shows why these are important high-risk groups. what this graph here shows you is the age-specific rate of homicide offending. and what you'll see here in quite dramatic fashion really, how dramatically homicide offending goes up during the teen years. and it peaks, interestingly, between the ages of 18 and 20. this is precisely the group that you could conceivably affect by

a stricter standard of setting 21 as a legal age for permitting of happened guns. i think -- handguns. i think one important thing to note, of course, is how rapidly it drops off over time as people get older. and what that suggests is that be you start to consider expanding your prohibitions, it may be quite justifiable and may be politically wise to think about these as they don't necessarily have to be lifelong prohibitions from legal gun ownership if they general hi avoid -- generally avoid involvement in crime. so, um, beer versus guns, which is more dangerous in the hands of 18-20-year-olds? in all 50 of our states, 31 is the -- 21 is the minimum legal age for consumption of alcohol.

this is probably largely attributable to the effective advocacy of mothers against drunk driving who are fed up with all the death that had occurred due to underage drinking. i think and hope that perhaps we're at a similar time right now when we think about gun violence in this country. in only five states as well as the district of columbia have we set 21 as the minimum legal age for handgun possession. so what about youth who are found to have committed serious crimes in juvenile courts? there's a number of studies that find that committing serious crime at a young age is a reasonably robust predicter of subsequent violence. and as we noted before in the graph, the risk declines with age quite substantially. so, again, maybe we can think about time-limited prohibitions. and in many states that have these types of laws do, indeed,

do that. in massachusetts, for example, has a period of five years that bans firearm possession for such individuals. in california and pennsylvania, they have the prohibition up until age 30 which, again, is very consistent with the age to fending curves. by the way, i showed you homicide offending. other violent crime, particularly robbery, looks very similar to the homicide offending. so what about alcohol and drug abusers? right now many such individuals can legally possess guns. we know from a variety of studies that being dependent or an alcohol or drug abuser greatly increases your risk. this is one graphical depiction comparing the prevalence of alcohol and drug dependence among violent to fenders in local jails in comparison to the general population.

quite stark differences there. similarly, alcohol is a very important risk factor for intimate partner violence and homicide. this shows you the prevalence of alcohol abuse in the first bar there being where there's no intimate partner violence, the yellow bar with physical, prior physical abuse and, um, the red bar with intimate partner homicide. so alcohol plays a very important role in violence, and if we can keep guns out of the hand of such abusers, i think we'll save a lot of lives. we're going to cover this, so i'm just going to say very briefly that we know that misdemean plants have a much higher rate for offending, and he'll get into that more just right after this talk. so what's the evidence about broadening categories for prohibited firearm possessors? unfortunately, we don't have a

lot of research that looks at firearm possession on specific high-risk groups. we have here april earlier presented the research on domestic violence restraining orders. the doctor is going to talk to us in a minute about what do we know about restricting gun possession by violent misdemean ants. any such policy effects are going to be much more likely to be effective when you have other policies in place that prohibit these illegal transactions, and we'll be covering that ground, too, in subsequent talks. policy implications. i think, again, there's clear evidence that the current prohibitions don't take us where we need to be to really protect our citizens from gun violence. stricter standards could greatly increase the number who are at

risk of gun offending, and we have some evidence that denying firearm possession for those groups, firearm purchase does reduce violence. as i said before, these prohibitions may not need to be lifelong, and i think perhaps our most important issue to wrestle with is this the minimum -- is the minimum age for handgun possession. i think, personally, it should be 21. it's quite logical just based upon what we know about adolescent and young adult development. but even if you don't have outright prohibitions for that group, it also could be wise to think about whether there might be extra conditions placed upon their firearm possession given that it is a high-risk group. so i will stop there and now introduce our next speaker which

is dr. wintermute. in my opinion, one of the most creative, bold thinkers went it comes to gun violence and policy research. he's just contributed an enormous amount of very important work. i'm so glad that he's going to share it with us today. thank you. [applause] >> so while he's setting up, if daniel's right that it's true -- [inaudible] so i had some introductory remarks about, um, giving honor to memory and funding is hard to get and so on, but i learned from if my mentor -- from my mentor, man responsible for my career in the business, steve tarot, and the careers of daniel

and jan and others that taking one's introductory remarks and wadding them up and throwing them away at the beginning of a talk can be a way to get everybody's attention. [laughter] so, steve, thank you and payback. i am going to say this. thank you to all of you for coming and to the people who are watch withing on c-span. this really isn't a conference about what we all know. this is a conference about what you all are going to do. and to the extent that we can help with that, that's our job, and we're happy to do it. but, please, take what you learn here today and tomorrow and do something wit. with it. now, we're going to -- this talk is going to build very closely on several that you just heard, it's going to build directly on daniel's remarks. we're going to be talking about a population that i think it's useful to call not so law-abiding gun owners. people who in one way or another fall through that crack that

daniel very nice ri outlined -- nicely outlined. they're not prohibited, they have some criminal activity. what goes on with those people. i come from california, a state where -- that takes very seriously its role as a laboratory of democracy, a state where we have good data, where those data are made available to researchers and where, bless their hearts, the legislature says, so, what's the latest evidence so we can turn that into policy? and those who have worked with me there know that i'm not making that stuff up. so let's get started. we go to a great deal of trouble here in the united states to detect and deny purchases, and you've heard the details, i'm not going to go back through them. we conducted almost 11 million background checks in 2009, we denied 150,000 of them. but the question really is do we deny enough? phil cook in his tape mentioned evidence from california that caused them to relook at those

findings. well, i'm that evidence. i basically sketched out on the back of an envelope given the narrow scope of the current denial criteria, even if you assume high rates of badness, it's probably impossible for their method to have found an effect. daniel mentioned but it's a point worth reemphasizing, most people who are interviewed when they are incarcerated for a crime, violent crime committed with a firearm, when they are interviewed and asked where did you get the gun that you used in committing that crime, most of those people are not prohibited from purchasing firearms at the time they commit the crime for which they are incarcerated. we're going to look at three studies. we're doing some science here, folks, and i'm going to move fast, so hang on. the first -- oh, i'm sorry. there are three questions. let me go back just for one moment. there are three questions that i'm going to address with these three studies. the first is, and i've sort of given you a hint to my thinking

about the answer. the first is do the current denial criteria cover the entire population at risk? i'm just going to show you a little bit more detail about why that answer is, no. number two is how often do people who purchase firearms legally, who pass a background check then go on to become prohibited persons? does that happen often enough to matter? should we do something about it? the answer is yes and yes, and i'll show you a little bit about that. and finally, i'm going to end on the up note of do these policies work, does it actually make a difference to screen people who are attempting to buy firearms. as daniel mentioned, i'm picking up where he left off. that answer is, yes. so first, study. addressing the question do the current prohibitions cover the populations at risk. bear with me a second. many slides have the this format, so i'm going to take a moment to set this up, and then i'll highlight differences. we did a series of cohort

differences in california which has good data. we know who buys handguns, we know the day on which they could have first acquired that gun. those data are made available for research purposes, can be linked to criminal records. we can do some serious science with that kind of information. the first of the three studies looked at people who legally purchased handguns in california in 1977. some of those people were in the definition that i'm going to use here, law-abiding gun owners. these people had never been convicted of a crime. there was another group of people who passed a background check who had convictions for one or more misdemeanor crimes which in california at that time were not grounds for denial, and in the rest of the united states with domestic -- with the exception of domestic violence, they are not grounds for denial today. we followed those four people forward in time for 15 years, and you've probably already worked your way all the way through to the results. what i'm presenting for you here

are the percentages of those handgun purchasers stratified by whether or not they had been convicted of a crime who were arrested, we use arrest as our outcome measure, over the ensuing 15 years broken down by type of crime. so as you can see, about 10% of those with no prior criminal history were, excuse me, arrested for any type of crime, 2.5% arrested for a violent crime index crime, the crime -- the violent crime index crimes are murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. and as you can see, the raw percentages for people with any conviction for any kind of offense no matter what kind of offense or how many convictions, the increase in just the raw incidence of events was by a factor of about five. so 10% of those with no prior conviction arrested for something, 50% with one or more

prior convictions arrested for something. so stick with me. as we move forward, we're on that same study. we are now moving from absolute risk in percentages to relative risk. and i'm going to step other to the board -- over to the board, to the screen. tell me if you can hear me in the back. i'm coming back to the podium. [laughter] and i'm sorry, i left my laser in sacramento. so if anybody has a laser, i'll steal it. the mouse is a laser. [inaudible conversations] oh, the cur corps. got it -- the cursor. got it. hey. [laughter] [applause] what was that about bold thinkers? [laughter] yeah. next time i'll keep my mouth shut. all right. this is the same study population. we're looking at relative risks. and, but this time -- there we

are. we've got prior convictions broken down in two different ways. so prior convictions not involving a gun and cannot involving violence -- and not involving violence in this group. and this group further broken down -- i keep losing the cursor -- this group further broken down whether they have one or two convictions, nothing worse than that. okay? then we have a group that had prior convictions involving guns but not violence. carrying a concealed firearm, let's say. and again broken down whether they have one such conviction or two or more. and finally, if you will, at the apex of criminality, those who have convictions for violence offenses. but remember, i am talking about people who purchased handguns legally, passed a background check. these are all misdemeanor crimes. and then again one or more. now, we are moving from percentages to relative risk, and i'm sorry for those of you

who eat and breathe relative risk, not all of us in the room do. in this case, we're not talking about percentages, we're talking about ratios. so in our comparison group here in all cases is the law-abiding gun. purchasers, those with no prior criminal record. so on the top line here, even those who had one prior misdemeanor conviction and that for an offense that involved neither guns, nor violence were essentially six times as likely as the law-abiding gun owners to be arrested for something. and sort of in the five range right on across. notice, and i'm going to stick with this group just for a second, what we call a dose response relationship. and i'll put it in plain english. the badder you were before, the greater the risk that you are going to be bad later, at least to some extent. the relative risks in this two-plus group are higher than they are in the one group. again, always compared to

handgun purchasers with no prior criminal record. now, let me skip down all the way to the bottom. those with prior misdemeanor convictions for violent offenses, one, two or more, and let's just go all the way to the bottom of the table, 11 times as likely as the law-abiding gun owners over 15 years to be arrested for a violent offense. basically the same. and 15 times as likely to be arrested on a charge of murder or, rape, robbery or aggravated assault. these are all legal hand gun purchasers. this study was done in 1977 to 1992. california has since changed its denial criteria. we're going to focus on that in just a moment. but i would point out that with the exception of the addition of misdemeanors in the mid '90s and under federal law, this is the population that is purchasing firearms in most of the rest of the united states today.

now, our or second question; how often do legal purchasers of handguns become prohibited persons? another cohort study done in california from 1991 forward, by this time california has changed its denial criteria and no longer allows the purchase of firearms -- we look at all firearms -- by persons with a history of of a misdemeanor violent conviction. and we're going to look at the impact of that policy change as our third study, but we're going to start with this one. so in this case we have a little over 7200 purchasers. about 4500 with no criminal record, 2700 with any kind of criminal history at all, an arrest, etc., but we're going to look for our follow-up purposes just at those, um, with prior convictions. we followed these people from '91 through sort of 1996.

among those who had a prior conviction, 21% were arrested, 4.5% -- just shy of 5% -- were convicted of a prohibiting offense within five years. it was interesting, i'm just going to mention this as an aside, to look, to see in these data that, as always is the case, able and the extent of -- age and the extent of the prior criminal history were both important predicters of risk of criminal activity in the future such that if you compared our oldest group, those agings 45-49, if you compare our oldest age group and specifically in that group those who had no prior criminal record to our youngest age group, those ages 21-24 with multiple prior convictions, risk of arrest varied by a factor of 200. the law treats all these people the same. let's look at some outcomes.

now, we are looking at prior record, risk of a new conviction. but, again, while we have convictions stratified here, the law-abiding gun owners and our with a varying number previously convicted legal purchasers of firearms and there are no violent mismean? plants in this system, our background check system works pretty well. the numbers are relatively small, but we are looking at percentages. so this is the percentage of purchasers stratified by their prior criminal history characteristics who become prohibited persons within five years. for those with three or more, it's 7%. and these are people who are convicted for murder, rape, robbery or aggravated assault. 7.3% of 10 million people is a lot of people, it would seem to me.

and i need to point out on several grounds these are underestimates. first off, indictments are not in here as prohibiting events or for follow up. domestic violence restraining orders are not in here. convictions that occur out of state are not in here. these are california-only data. and probably the most important thing, we're only looking at five years. lots of arrests have not been fully adjudicated. and finally -- so all of that leads to an underestimation based just for california. but it's further an underestimation for the rest of the united states because our denial criteria are stricter than most states are. the violet misdemeanants are not in here. now, we can scale this up a little bit. in california for the last five years or so, we've actually had a program that tracks people who have in the past legally purchased firearms and have since become prohibited persons.

and in selected cases actually tries to go get their guns back. that program has confiscated thousands of firearms from thousands of people. we know the process evaluation. our group is hoping to do the outcome evaluation. you get the model here, the people from whom firearms are recovered less likely to do harm? we'll see. but we have a rolling list in california of people who have recently become prohibited who are known because they're in the state's archive of handgun purchase records. we don't have long guns, but we're adding them. we have a list of about 20,000 people recently prohibited, etc., etc. we're about 10% of the population, just do that simple math, and there might be 200 some thousand people like this around the country about which i suspect something ought to be done. last study, we'll end on the happy note. does this, um, screening people and preventing purchases work?

we're looking, going to look here at the results of that policy change i mentioned in which california enacted a new criterion for prohibition based on prior conviction for a violent misdemeanor. we have two groups of people. all of the members of both groups sought to purchase handguns in california. our treatment group, if you will, sought to purchase handguns in the first year of the new policy under the terms of the new policy, their purchases were denied. the control group sought to purchase guns in the two years as it turns out prior to the institution of the new policy, old policy. their purchases were allowed. other than that difference, the two groups were almost eerily similar in demographics and so on. we set an age restriction of under age 35. why mess with old guys? they don't do crime. obviously, we took as a full hypothesis that there would be

no difference in risk of arrest. and i'm going to give you just a snapshot, all of this stuff is published and available. we are again looking at relative risks, but i'm throwing another curve at you here. we have some characteristics over here. our entire study population, young people, etc., the referent group is not on the chart. the referent group in this case for each line of data is persons with that characteristic whose purchases were denied. you are looking at relative risks for purchasers relative to denied persons. everybody with me on that? i've twisted this format quite a bit. so what we haver -- what we have here is in plain english across the board people whose purchases were allowed 30% increases in risk for arrest, among those ages 21-24 where the absolute

rates are highest, in our state you can't buy a handgun if you're under 21, a 40% risk in increase if you got your gun. if you had a whole passel of prior convictions, an 80% increase in arrest if you got your gun. there's a much longer list of subsets for which we did not see this effect, and that is among people who had three or more prior convictions for firearm-related or violet misdemeanors. in that group denial did not make a difference. and i suspect this that might well be the group who if they can't get a gun from a dealer, by golly, they are going to go out and get somebody because they are involved in a career. and they're not going to be deterred. i'm going to very briefly mention our findings. current denial criteria don't cover the population. purchasers become prohibited persons frequently enough to matter. background checks work. here's what i think we ought to do, it's mostly been mentioned.

we should expand denial criteria to include convictions for violent misdemeanors. we'll make mixed checks better. i'm not going to talk about delayed denials. this i want to take one minute and mention. we need to avoid a problem of false eligibility that is embedded in the current legislation, the fixed gun checks act, that is promoted as a solution for this problem. the fixed gun checks act is described as requiring a background check for every gun purchase. in my judgment, it does not do that. it allows a person to waive the background check and purchase a firearm if they are in one of about 17 states and have a nominally unexpired -- it still says on the card it's valid -- permit to purchase, excuse me, permit to carry a concealed firearm or a similar permit. i've still got the card in my wallet, but as we have all learned, a lot can happen in fife years, and there are thousands of people walking around the united states, i

would suspect, who have those unexpired cards who are, in fact, prohibited persons who have recently become prohibited because they've been convicted of a violent crime and whose risk of recidivism is higher at that moment than it will be at any time in the future. and those people should be going through a background check. thank you very much. [applause] >> okay. um, i'm going to open this up for questions for about ten minutes or so. i know everybody is probably getting hungry, like i am. but i know many of you are experts yourselves and have questions and issues that you might want to raise for any of the panelists. so i invite you now. we have some folks with microphones on the aisles who will -- so maybe we'll start on the end over here with this -- >> hello.

question: um, does the current government consideration of what i'll just call knock and block laws which would allow the police to recover guns in the homes of individuals who are particularly high of risk individuals -- high-risk individuals, it seems to be leading to a response on the other side of lock and block, of individuals who are on the fringe end of gun owners who are running out purchasing large quantities of guns, locking them away to block the government from gaining access to those guns in a recovery fashion. so can you discuss knock and block on the government side and how it's now led to lock and block on the gun fringe side? >> garen's going to tackle this

one here. >> i'll take it. is the mic on? okay. um, thanks for the question. california has something called an armed and prohibited persons system, it's what i briefly alluded to. when a person is convicted of a prohibiting offense or they're served with a restraining order, notification is sent to sacramento. within a couple of days, the state has searched its archives of handgun purchases, assault weapon registrations, other databases to determine if there's any evidence that this person is, has purchased firearms in the past. we've learned that those systems are not perfect. there are lots of gun owners who are not in the system, but it's what we have, and we're making it better. every time there's a hit notification is sent to the local law enforcement agency, you've got an armed and prohibited person in your jurisdiction. up to that jurisdiction what they want to do, and we're hoping to pull together the

state's experience with them. but the department of justice has its own squad that in selected cases goes out. last year alone they recovered more than 2,000 firearms from recently-prohibited people. they've been doing it for five years. there has yet to be an injury associated with that program. to their knowledge, these people are friends of mine, we talk all the time. to their knowledge, there has not been a single incidence of retaliatory violence related to that program. what we don't know is the outcome in terms of risk of criminal activity. we just don't have that information. but at a process level, it's been working for five years. >> okay. >> good morning. louis -- [inaudible] and i wanted to just, first of all, thank you for this conference. it was worth the very early morning plane ride from boston.

this antipathy to gun control seems to have been developing over years, maybe decades and has become sort of ingrained in our society which brings up a number of questions, and i just have two to propose. the first is do we have to just look at this as part of social discourse a little bit like the drinking and driving so that friends don't let friends drive drunk, and, you know, designated drivers, some kind of new way of discussing -- [inaudible] which becomes very socially acceptable. second would be since this is so ingrained and it may take some years to change this whole process of gun control, is there a quick tech logic fix? is there a, i won't say silver bullet, is there some kind of thing, a fingerprint or some ways to use mod perp technology to make a -- modern technology

to make a quicker change than might be be done long term, change in social discourse? >> okay, thank you for your question. um, at least one aspect of the more technological fix, if you will, that yaw alluded -- that you alluded to we will be covering in an afternoon panel with a presentation by professor steven tarot. so maybe we'll hold that portion until his presentation. one thing, i guess there's only so many things that you can cover in one summit or book that we're going to do. the thing i probably most regret we don't have in here is the notion of microstamping ammunition and cartridges, that this is a new technology that would make it far, far, far more -- much easier to connect who shot that bullet in any

given case and could be a significant deterrent to violence as well as, of course, helping police solve crimes and get violet offenders -- violent offenders off the streets. but the first part of your question alluded to more having to do with, um, social changes and things like that. and clearly, i think that almost any public health success story that gets told in this institution typically has two components to it. there's a policy aspect of that success story, and hen there's a -- and then there's a sort of social norms component that go hand in hand. and i think in order to make the biggest reductions if -- in gun violence, we're going to have to focus on both of those sides. most of our discussions in this summit we're going to focus more on the policy component. but it's certainly occurred to me that, you know, the thing that we all talk about and we'll

talk about after lunch as well, this idea of private sales without background checks. there ought to be a law. of course there should be a law. but you know what? even a social norm even in states where it is legal, i'd sort of like to think with all of these responsible gun owners -- and there are plenty of responsible gun owners -- that people would sort of speak out, like, you know, that's a really sort of immoral thing to do, to sell a gun without a background check. i heard through someone that there's a gun owner in maine who's sort of had a campaign along those lines and on a voluntary basis. so i think we can and should make some progress on both sides. >> can i add -- >> certainly. >> thank you. so it's, i think it's an excellent point, and it deals with the problem that we have lots of guns in this country that are legally owned. and what we want to do is engage people in conversations so that they can make enlightened

decisions in their own interest. there's a project in new hampshire that katherine barber and mary -- [inaudible] are running through the harvard injury center where they've worked with gun shops to get the people who sell guns in these gun shops to put out brochures and posters about the risks of suicide with a gun. that encourages -- it has, it encourages conversations, it gives them information about who to call if they're having trouble or they're worried about somebody else. and just like the mothers against drunk driving movement that changed whether it was acceptable for me to tell you, you know, you're drunk, give me the keys, i'll drive you home or to have a designated driver, we've got to get to a point through civic, civil and factually-grounded conversation where it's just as logical for me to tell you i foe -- i know

you've been going through a hard time, you're going through a divorce, your kid has just failed a grade, broke up with his girlfriend, looks depressed, let me help you get rid of that gun temporarily until the crisis passes. and what we need to do is to build an infrastructure that makes it easy for people to actually act in their enlightened self-interest once they recognize the trade-offs that having a gun in the home entails. and there are impediments, structural impediments to doing that that could easily be overcome or at least are worth working on. for example, if as a physician i have someone in my office and they tell me, you know, i'm worried about myself or my child, i want to get rid of these guns, there isn't an easy way for me to say, okay, bring your guns to so and so, or i'll have someone come get them. we need to decrease the barriers or for people to act in a way that is in the accordance with what they think is best for the people in their home.

and it'll make it easier when we have a conversation for people to recognize what they need to do. what we need to do is build an infrastructure to allow them to do that more easily. >> excellent point, thank you. we're going to take one more quick question and, hopefully, quick response, and then we'll break for lunch. >> hello. i'm a national academic who has spent the last several years studying the financial crisis and the effects on our society. and i want to just interject this idea of main street. um, 35% of -- 85% of people have lost trust in their institutions, government and corporate. and it has to do with wealth inequality. we know, all of us in main street understand that wealth inequality was largely driven by massive corporate fraud that has yet to to be recovered, and it's caused such an instability in our society that we have is such a deepening third world poverty,

and that is what is going to be driving a lot of these crimes and violent gun statistics in the future. now, i also would suggest that as we think to ourselves why are ordinary people buying ak-47s and things like that, it is because of that lack of trust in government and our institutions. so i'm asking the panel and all of the people who are going to drive what we all know is a great program of gun control, the bad guys at the top of the social stratus are driving the problem. and if we look only regressively at how to control individuals wore going to be pressed into desperate situations, we respect going to solve the -- we aren't going to solve the problem. so, please, consider justice,

rule of law as the primary driver of the problem we have at hand right now. thank you. >> okay, thank you. so, clearly, there are many determinants of violence aside from guns. and i don't think anyone here would argue otherwise. um, however, i don't think that some people have used that kind of argument, though, as sort of, you know, sort of why bother, because it's all about root causes. but it's not only with violence. there are a number of public health problems that have these similar kind of injustices and inequalities at their roots. but we've found in many instances that you can apply very effective things that save lives with before you even can deal with all of those much more difficult issues.

so we are going to focus today on what are the things we can do with respect to gun policy that will save lives. so i think we're going to, we're going to break for lunch now. i've been told that there are lunches in finestone hall which is to your left as you exit here. where else? >> [inaudible] >> finestone hall is where you'll find lunch. so we're going to reconvene to start again at 1:35. so hope everybody will be here in time so we can get rolling. [inaudible conversations] >> so a break for lunch in this

daylong summit on reducing gun violence. this will last, let's see, about 40 minutes, and then we will return to live coverage here on c-span2. earlier today president obama held his final news conference of his first term. the first question dealt with his plans to address gun violence in his second term. >> yeah. >> i wanted to ask about gun violence. today marks the one-year -- or one-month anniversary of the shooting in newtown which seemed to generate some momentum for reinstating the assault weapons ban. but there's been fresh opposition from the nra, and even harry reid has said he questions whether it could pass congress. given that, how hard will you push for an assault weapons ban, and if one cannot bass congress, what other -- pass congress, what other measures would need to be included in order to curb gun violence successfully? >> well, as i said, the vice president and a number of members of my cabinet went through a very thorough process

over the last month meeting with a lot of stakeholders in this including the nra, listened to proposals from all quarters, and they've presented me now with a list of sensible, common sense steps that can be taken to make sure that the kinds of violence we saw at newtown doesn't happen again. i'm going to be meeting with the vice president today. i expect to have a fuller presentation later in the week to give people some specifics about what i think we need to do. my starting point is not to worry about the politics, my starting point is to focus on what makes sense, what works. what should we be doing to make sure that our children are safe and that we're reducing the incidents of gun violence. and i think we can do that in a sensible way that comports with the second amendment. and then members of congress, i

think, are going to have to have a debate and examine tear -- their own conscience. if, in fact -- and i believe this is true -- everybody across party lines was as deeply moved and saddened as i was by what happened in newtown, then, you know, we're going to have to vote based on what we think is best. we're going to have to come up with answers that set politics aside. and that's what i expect congress to do. but what you can count on is that the things that i've said in the past, the belief we have to have stronger background checks, that we can do a much better job in terms of keeping these magazine clips with high capacity out of the hands of folks who shouldn't have them, an assault weapons ban that is meaningful, that those are things i continue to believe make sense.

will all of them get through this congress? i don't know. but what's upperpost in my mind is making sure i'm honest with the american people and with members of congress about what i think will work, what i think is something that will make a difference and to repeat what i've said earlier. if there is a step we can take that will save even one child from what happened in newtown, we should take that step. >> president obama from his news conference, his final news conference of his first term just a short time ago on reducing the incidents of gun violence. by the way, you can see that entire news conference in the c-span video library. on capitol hill, the senate continues their break, but the house gavels in at 2 p.m. eastern today for legislative work. they'll vote at 6:30 on the agenda this week, hurricane sandy relief. before leaving ten days ago, the chamber passed a bill that included $9.7 billion in relief,

but this week we do expect work on another bill allotting over $50 billion. live house coverage on c-span, and that starts at 2 p.m. eastern. the house rules committee meets this afternoon to consider amendments to the hurricane sandy aid measure. before the 112th congress ended, the senate passed a bill providing $60 billion in aid, but as we just mentioned, the house has so far only agreed to a portion of that funding. the rules committee today will focus on legislation providing another 51 billion. you can see that meeting live at 5 p.m. eastern here on c-span2. and a week from today you can watch the public inaugural ceremonies of president obama's second term including his swearing in which will start at noon eastern on c-span. we'll also show you the lunch in the u.s. capitol and the parade up pennsylvania avenue. throughout the day we'll take your phone calls, you can also comment on our facebook page and on twitter. live coverage next monday, january 21st, at 7 a.m. eastern on c-span. you can also listen on c-span

radio or watch on c-span.org. and, again, we'll have more from the gun violence summit happening all day today at johns hopkins university in baltimore. it'll start again at about 1:35 eastern. california representative mike thompson chairs a task force that's examining ways to reduce and prevent gun violence. this comes in the aftermath of the mass shooting last month in newtown, connecticut. members of the public have been invited to forums to voice their opinions. one of them was held last week in santa rosa, california, and here's a portion of that now. >> and now i do have the pleasure of introducing congressman mike thompson. congressman thompson was first elected to the united states congress in 1998. mike serves on the subcommittee on health and subcommittee on select revenue measures within the committee on ways and means as well as being the ranking member of the subcommittee on terrorism, human intelligence analysis and counterintelligence

and the subcommittee on oversight all within the permanent select committee on intelligence. congressman thompson is a combat veteran. he was a staff sergeant platoon leader in vietnam with the 173rd airborne of the united states army. he's also a purple heart recipient. mike has a reputation for problem solving, for reaching across the aisle. he has been a great asset for the county of sonoma, and we thank him very much. mike is also a gun owner and an avid hunter, i understand, and i can think of no one who is better suited to serve as chair of the prevention task force. congressman, thank you very much for all your work and welcome. [applause] >> mr. chairman, thank you. thank you very much, and thank you all for coming out tonight. this is the third town hall meeting on our effort to prevent gun violence. and input from the public is extremely important, so i'm

honored that you took time to come out tonight and share your constructive ideas with how we can accomplish this. it's, i just can't emphasize how important it is. and as everyone knows, emotions got extremely high, motivation and constituent input to do something about gun violence hit an all-time peak after the terrible, terrible tragedy in connecticut. there's no question that that's the worst gun tragedy that i've ever seen in my life, and i can understand why people in communities are upset and why they're concerned and why they want something done about it. but i also want to caution folks that there is no one bill that can be passed, there's not one magic wand that can be waved that can guarantee that we never have problems like that. and we can't move forward by judging our efforts on the last

tragedy. and as bad as that was, as bad as that was, gun violence is with us every day. we see it most often when it's a huge, huge tragedy such as connecticut. but the truth is since that connecticut trial judge, there's been over 800 -- connecticut tragedy, there's been over 800 people killed with fire or arms in our country, and the american people have said loud and clear they want something done about it. i've been appointed to chair a task force to try and do something about it. and as the chairman said, i'm a gun owner, i'm a veteran, a combat vet ann, i'm a hunter -- veteran, i'm a hunter, i understand guns. and i understand that the only way we can do it is if we all come together, we all are at the table and everything's on the table. and that's the only way we're going to be able to forge a solution that works and makes sure our communities are safer than they are today.

so i'm looking forward to your constructive comments as to ideas you might have on how we can accomplish that. i want to right up front state clearly and succinctly this is not a listening session or a hearing on the second amendment. that issue is not what we're talking about. the second amendment is guaranteed in the constitution of the united states of america. and when the court ruled, when the u.s. supreme court ruled in the heller decision, they took this away from the argument. no longer can folks on one side say we can own any gun we want, and no longer can folks on the other side say this only pertains to a militia. the court was real clear. ..

i don't think we have to do that. i think if you're not done will give everybody time to talk. maybe we can get some good ideas out there in order to help the solution. we are in pretty good shape tonight on our panel. we have some real experts. here i'm going to ask each one of them to make some brief opening comments, and they are here to clarify any issues. and more important, like me, they are here to listen to any ideas that may come about. so first i'll start with mike

kennedy, sonoma county department of mental health division. >> thank you. so, the comments i would like to make focus on, that we know, we know that for mental health, people would come individuals of mental health issues and also serious mental health issues, our goal and i think a lot of folks know that in california with a mental health service act our goal has been really to intervene earlier, provide better access to link people to treatment. and we believe that that would help things in general. one of things i wanted to talk about is we through the middle health service act and the county and alaska leaders of them in one new program that i think is worth mentioning, and it's called our crisis assessment education she. and focuses on, it's a

partnership with community college, junior college, and about nine high schools, two high schools, and all the city high schools. we have a county team license staff and a psychiatrist that are available and go to schools to do assessments. we actually said on the crisis team at the community college so that we can talk together. since we're part of their health center where able to exchange information, and we're actually able to direct link students and of mental health issues, directly to services in the last year and a half we've been able to hospitalize about 10 young people, give him stabilized, and then they're able to stay in school. we work also out the high schools. we work in tandem with some of santa rosa's resource officers,

with assistant principals, and we are available to go out and do assessments. the second part of it though is, what we found it is a lot of teachers, family members were saying to us, you know, we saw some issues, we just didn't really know what to do. so the other thing that this team provides to all those settings is something we call qdr, which is question, persuade, refer. evidence-based model that teaches individuals the signs of mental element, depression, suicide. and then what questions to ask him how to persuade somebody to get help and then how to actually access help. that would be to bring the teen out there. it's been so successful at the schools that serve of the other schools now we are training incoming freshmen, the whole classes in qpr, plus teachers.

and so it really gives us the ability to do aggressive outreach, and then target young people really between the ages of 16 and mid '20s not having either first psychotic breaks or service than the illness. so it's one of the programs that i think is extremely effective and could help prevent some of these things. >> thank you. next, sheriff freitas. >> good evening. first, i'd like to thank congressman thompson for inviting me to be on this panel and i'd also like to thank all of you for taking time to come out and give us your thoughts. i'm appreciative to see this graph, to see people at the time out and come listen to this. one thing from an enforcement standpoint vouchers like to mention that maybe we could accomplish through this process would be many of us in

law-enforcement, and i talked to many of my calls, chiefs and police here in sonoma county today. we feel that the gun laws are quite frankly confusing to many of them. i think it's hard to enforce the laws from street level enforcement aspect because the loss hard to interpret and understand it if it's hard for us, then it must be hard for the public. we like to see the law simplified and then and forced. and other than that i'll be happy to listen to what people have to say tonight. thank you again for having me. >> next, district attorney jill ravitch. >> thank you. is a pleasure to be here tonight, and it's a pleasure because a subject his gun violence prevention. unfortunately, my experience is in the aftermath of gun violence. my job is all about dealing with what happens after the carnage. dealing with victims, trying to figure out the proper way of dealing with the offenders, and i would really like to lose that opportunity, through prevention. i'm excited to hear what mike kennedy is doing with mental

health. i think that one of the results of that tragedy in connecticut was it got us talking about mental illness and what we can do better as a community to deal with mental illness problems. and integrate those individuals into our community and to provide services. select the sheriff and the others, i'm here to listen. i'm here to look for better solution. and ultimately i'm here to find better ways to prevent gun violence. thank you. >> thank you. next, doctor steve arrington, superintendent, sonoma county schools. [inaudible] >> on behalf of the professional community, and before that by opening comments, on behalf of the teachers in sonoma county we wish to on an express our. >> to the students, teachers, administrators and psychologist who lost their lives at sandy hook elementary school. we remember these young children who died too soon.

we take our role to educate the students in sonoma county schools seriously, and i know that all school employees are especially attuned to this issue of school safety and student well being, following this horrific incident. the educators who sacrificed their lives as sandy hook did so because they were committed to creating a better world for teaching. let us keep their memories alive through their own and our own dedicated work in sonoma county schools. our students are the hope and promise for the future. as the county superintendent i wish to reassure you that every one of our schools in sonoma county have current and on file school safety plants. many of our schools have cooperative policing agreements. for school resource officers at the secondary level, nine-12. every k. eight school conducts safety drills once a month. every high school conducts quarterly drill ones each year. of those drills, to must be at

least lockdowns into must be earthquakes. as resources are available to schools, we are required to retrofit and redesign our campuses through the post-columbine design requirement that came out of that terrible incident. the teaching professionals and administrators and school classified employees who work diligently with school boards and community wish to provide safe campuses for every child. but we are also aware that we can increase the safety by reducing the risk, and that's why i'm here tonight. to listen to the ways we can reduce the risks to our children and to our teachers. most of our campuses are not designed as well as the school at sandy hook. that is a self-contained school that did not have the open how you affect of california schools. so we have a little more difficult situation in securing our schools for a lockdown. but one of the good things about

our community is that under proposition 63, which you passed a few years ago, we were able to initiate a pilot program for the mental health that was expressed to you. so i think in archimedes interest to know what we're doing, and i hope more of these results will be shared with the total commitment. thanks very much. >> and then next is special agent like graham with the state department of justice, who should probably get a pin for being here three days in a row. >> thank you, sir. convening everyone. i'm here to talk but two different broke up with the california department of justice involved in regarding firearms. first of which i'll talk about background checks. the department of justice specifically the pair of firearms, conducts background checks for the state. we query many different databases. restraining order systems, criminal history, mental health system. we check for convictions in

state, out of state, and various other federal systems as well. last year, sorry, two years ago 2011 now, we get 601,000 background checks. in 2012, we did 812,000. so far this year, that was yesterday, we did at 2700 already. there's been a big spiked lately in the number of background checks. the other side of that is the people that are denied consistently, it's about 1.1% of those that apply to buy a gun. that's held up over many years. those people that purchase guns lawfully sometimes become prohibited later. that leads to the second program on going to talk about real briefly called the arms person system. those people, one point purchased a gun, they can't

simply become prohibited through a mistake of their own, legally, maybe a mental health issue, things like that. currently there are about 18, 19,000 people, depending on the day, it fluctuates, that are in our system that have a prohibition of some kind. and they have about 30, 39,000 weapons associated to them, statewide. we have teams out just about every day of the week. there are only 33 agents in the state that attempt to contact these people. so we are small but we're doing what we can. our team is out tonight. i think that's probably all i have. >> so 39,000 guns that are in the possession of people who are prohibited from owning guns, those are own handguns and assault weapons? >> correct. those are the weapons that we are allowed to track, handguns

and registered assault weapons. >> so the reality is that could be a lot more than that? >> correct. generally when we seize weapons, we will seize a few the ones that we know about, and then others that are generally rifles and shotguns that are not in our system currently. >> thank you. as you can tell by the panel, this is a very, very complex issue of gun violence prevention. and across as many disciplines. it deals with mental health. it deals with education. it deals with background checks. it deals with guns and accessories themselves, as well as a culture of violence that is also very, very difficult to deal with. this second amendment stuff is tough, try the first. if you've got ideas, we want to hear from you. how are we doing this? >> thank you, congressman. folks who wanted to speak fill out a speaker card and handed

them to the staff in front, then everyone will have a minute and a half. and if you look, you're left, there's a traffic signal there. green beans have plenty of time to kill a major 30 seconds, and that read your time is up and we will try to remind you when you're done, thank you very much. >> and you're going to call five at a time? >> i am. i'm going to call five at a time, and before the fifth speaker speaks and i will call the other five up so that we don't have any, so that we don't have any break. on we ready to go? >> we are ready. >> so with the first, five come up please. supervisor shirley, madeline and ian. ted hine which, dave adams and susan speer. [inaudible]

>> i am a retired military officer. >> okay. let these speakers speak, please. >> pardon? >> let the speakers speak spent how do i get in on this? >> why don't you fill out a yellow card and put anonymous and then they could call you up. okay, thank you. >> go ahead, surely. >> okay, thank you. first of all, thank you, congressman thompson for being here. i'm really glad that you've been appointed to this important committee. as tragic as gun homicide is, potentially when it involves our precious children, i want to make sure that the relationship between guns, gun ownership, suicide and veteran suicide is part of the dialogue tonight. i want to share some sobering statistics with you. suicide is the leading cause of

fire arm death. in 2009, the u.s. firearm suicide total was over 18,000, an 11% increase from 2006. as compared to half that number of homicides. although most gun owners reportedly keep a firearm in their home for protection or self-defense, 83% of gun related deaths intent on homes are the result of a suicide, often by somebody other than the gun owner. homes with guns are five times more likely or suicide with a household member then homes without guns, five times. death by fire arm is the fastest-growing method of suicide. and unlike suicide should other methods, 92% of suicide attempts with a gun or fail. meaning a temporary depressed person who uses a gun will never get a second chance at life. individuals are nine times more likely to buy -- to die by suicide if a loaded gun is in

the house and if there is no c can. congressman thompson, i know you're a veteran and i know veterans issues are near and dear to your heart, as they are to mind, and i brought up a photo of my dad it was a marine corps world war ii veteran distinguished flying cross, and i just want to share a couple of facts and to ask you for what i would like you to address your tonight. 20% of u.s. deaths from suicide our veterans, yet of veterans take up only 10% of the population. veterans are more likely than the general population to use firearms as a means of suicide, and among male veterans, 84% have completed suicides involve firearms. [inaudible] >> i'm going to give my conclusion. i will be within one minute, i promise. [booing] >> all right. >> sit down.

>> okay, quiet down. you can give me your close later. >> thank you. thank you, and i thank you for being here tonight. thanks. >> hello. i'm madeline, i know you know me. ian was with jerry the day he was murdered here so i won't be able to tell you the whole story but i will start. first of all, thank you for online me to speak today. you knew jerry mello very well. my husband, jerry, excuse me, i always speak with emotion. was murdered on august 27, 2011. this is the issue that we face today, and our country faces. it is the very issue that i have struggled with every day since jerry's murder.

the das report shows that not only was jerry's murder known by the family to be mentally ill and a drug user, but also that the semi automatic weapon used to gun down jerry was given to him by a family member. it is suspected is able to purchase the multiple round clip legally himself. jerry worked for local timber company. he was accompanied by a neighbor to verify a report that there was a trust us on that property. that neighbor is the and cheney. jerry was unarmed, but ian carried a gun that day. not an automatic weapon at a handgun. i gun he had to use. in firing that and then he was able to surprise the killer, and gained just enough time to escape with the killer chasing and shooting at them. if he did not have that kind,

ian would not be standing here with me tonight. and he would have left behind a beautiful little girl and a loving wife. i strongly support our right to own and use guns. however, the unchecked act of violent criminals takes away the rights of others to live a safe and protected life. what to do now, you will hear 1000 solutions. but i say enforce the laws we have. every law enforcement agency i have talked to -- [applause] >> seeing the same song. budget cuts, lack of trained personnel, lack of a will to prosecute. gunowners have a responsibility to keep those guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, drug users, and convicted criminals. i thank you very much.

[applause] >> hello. my name is ted heinrich. i have to say that's very difficult speech to follow. i'm not unfamiliar with guns your as a cadet, i was on an award-winning rifle team in chicago, illinois, so it's not out of some sort of fear that i speak on this tonight. but i am appalled at the reckless distribution of firearms in this country and the tragic destruction of lives and families that this is causing. why we have laws on the books to control sales, for example, they are also shot through with holes and exceptions, but they're

meaningless for the purpose. for example, if it makes sense to do background checks on gun buyers in the stores so, why is it not equally sensible to do background checks for internet sales are sales at a gun show? [applause] >> we need to license cars and drivers because of the equipment and its use poses a danger to the public. and we need to apply these same reasons to gun control. i hope, ultimately, that -- and my out? well, thank you very much. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> a point of clarification while waiting for the next speaker. we do in california, but in other states we don't.

and this is a national issue so all these things need to be taken into consideration. next. >> good evening. my name is susan spier, and i'm a resident of sonoma county. and i don't have anything profound to say. i would just like to thank you for taking the time. this is a very, very complex issue, and one that is deeply felt i'm sure by everybody in the room. i'm just hoping that within time we can find a way to really curtailed a lot of what's happening. thank you. >> could we have james johnson, mike malone, john logan, michael ciardi, and margaret fischman, please. >> i'm james johnson.

i'm a retired school psychologist here in sonoma county. i've been a credential school psychologist for over 40 years. there needs to be early intervention, very early intervention, kindergarten, first grade level. there needs to be clear and available help for all students at early ages. early intervention is key. so your mental health programs are key to get to students of early. we have a situation where many students are identified early on, and there is no way for a parent to access services unless it's either mandated by juvenile court or they volunteered. i've had several parents call me not only in my private practice but publicly, their kids, by the time they are 13, 12, are out of control. so early intervention is a key to this issue. and it must be engineered carefully and completely all over the state.

thank you. [applause] >> i'm mike malone. i'm a geologist. i spent a significant amount of my time on the north coast, increase in the pipe of a drug cartel, pit bulls and the occasional cougar. personal defense is important to me. congressman thompson, your committee has waded in some very deep water here. i think your actions in politics could stabilize or they could have some very serious unintended consequences. it's obvious to me that there are those who oppose the second amendment and absorbing not implying that to you. but there are those who do that, and they use political subterfuge to slowly undo the this fundamental right. by means of agencies, bureaucracies -- [applause] -- >> without having to answer to the american people. california, for example, to realize it's a federal thing we're talking budget, but

california, for example, has created a twisted base of fire arm regulation, including for the purpose of legitimate personal safety and self-defense in constant jeopardy of being criminalized. our legislatures response, there's not a proposal to double down on failure and fingerprint people who buy ammunition. i hope to hear from you this evening a promise as one of our representatives in congress that you and your committee will recommend that all proposed fire arm, federal fire on regulations will be openly debated and voted on in congress, and not imposed on americans by executive order. i would expect that the president -- [applause] >> shhh. >> that if the president runs a democratic process that is a congress that you and your committee members would protest loud and clear and a sword congresses authority over the

president in these serious matters. >> thank you. before -- [applause] spent the more clapping and stuff goes on, the longer it will take to get through the speakers, and we're only going to be here until 915 thymic. so i would suggest we don't show that, that every. and and i just want to point o out, on what the administration can do by executive order, i heard it for the first time yesterday when the rest of you heard that, and that was my first question, exactly what can the president do. and as i understand, this is what he can do by executive order. he can appoint an atf director, something that hasn't been in place and needs to be in place. he can prosecute prohibited purchasers who attempted by guns. he can't but he can see to it it's done. help local law enforcement when a gratuitous buyer tries to buy a gun and is tonight. require federal agencies to report records to the instant background check, nics service.

and he can remove the remaining restructure and from the fy '14 budget that race text mining to be used to trace crime data. something that even the original author of that effort said was foolish, and he wished he could go back and undo it. that's it. spent my name is john logan. i am 100% disabled retired vietnam veteran. unlike you, sir, i was combat wounded. i am the ungrateful recipient of two 8-k rasp bit i see no practical purpose whatsoever to owning assault weapons except to destroy human life. at the same time, at the same time i am not in favor of gun control. if there are 200 million weapons in this country already, as i have -- >> 300. >> all right. then that's just about one per person, but yet less than 50% of

the people i believe only those. >> 20%. >> okay. so you are going to have a hard time eating them back. and i know within five miles of here where i can pick up a thompson machine gun, and a our 15 or and a.k. without talking to anybody, even though they are illegal in this state. >> okay. >> my point is this. that is, that one of the things that might be included in one of the bills, to be comprehensive, is to have a generous buyback program, especially in these economic times that a lot of people might want to turn some of these weapons in. if he owned three, you might get one. but the point is you get rid of some of them. i don't care if you ban assault weapons. i don't need an assault weapon to protect my home. if it takes me more than five friends to do away with an intruder, i should either be dead or i will be. ..

>> so kids getting killed in a school is very high priority. but the alternative is like senator feinstein's ban does nothing. those weapons, if you eliminate weapons, only the criminals are going to have weapons. england's that way now, their crime rate's jumping 89% per year, and nobody can own a gun in england. now, it is true -- i looked, believe me -- >> what do they do with all those purdys that they sell over there? [laughter] >> some of the upper echelon people can go out and do

bearing, what they call biering, but still those purdy shotguns are around. let's see, where do i want to go with this? like everybody else keeps say, first thing you've got to do with the guns, john steinbeck said that the mind is the weapon, everything else is merely supplemental, and that pretty much sums it up. anybody who wants to kill somebody, they're going to find a way to kill them. somebody's going to find out a bomb's a lot easier and kill a lot of people like timothy mcveigh did, who, by the way, he tried to get into the special forces. they cut him loose, and he went and blew up -- >> thank you. >> thank you. >> before the next speaker, could we have peter alexander, phil graph, hugh fike sr.,

orrlean coley and fred rome, please. >> go ahead. >> hi. my name is margaret fishman, i'm a retired teacher from montgomery high school. i'm a liberal democrat. i'm a proponent of the brady bill, and i am a gun owner. there are limits to most of my constitutional rights, and the second amendment is no exception. i may not own a surface to air missile nor a functional tank, however, i would never want to ban all guns. my message is this: the time is now for reasonable federal legislation. while i have advocated continually on this issue, it appears that the public and political will are now intersecting, a perfect storm, if you will. the time is now for bans on assault weapons. we could get into a massive discussion on these weapons, but i'm referring to high-capacity, removable clips. universal background checks are needed, registration and a nationwide buyback program.

the time is now. i trust that the intent of this forum is more than show and tell and that vice president biden's nationwide effort to hear the people will result in actual federal legislation without flaws that allows the skirting the issue or the law. i know from personal experience that the nra does not speak for all gun owners. the nra is mostly a lobbying organization and remits gun manufacturers and is mostly motivated by profit. the time is now. i am not so naive to think that the limits on guns would create a crime-free world. there are a host of additional areas to be addressed such as mental health and educational issues. but i do think we can minimize killing, and the time is now. thank you. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> good evening. peter alexander.

i wrote my notes down. almighty see, almighty be. may the almighty's spirit be upon us all and highest praise unto the living lord, for as it's been given, we wrestle not against flesh and blood, and there will be no answers through the political or legal means. mental illness be with those seeking to maintain the insane resulting in homeless vets and children, neverending wars and the core of all war. the slaughterhouse murder of 14 million -- [inaudible] today and the day after and the day after maintaining satan's laughter. come out of the religions, longstanding deception with a 40-day general strike for freedom which be our royal reception. let us shine a light on the common denominator which, to those familiar and comprehending, be nk ultra

signatures with all these mass shootings is the connection. also connecting to dennis kucinich's current effort assisting gulf war vets from '92 to 2002, over 200,000 vets' deaths by vaccines, murdered by genocide by advantage seens de-- vaccines designed -- [inaudible] and my knowledge be firsthand, for i've been privy to conversations with.ñl

>> pull the mic over close. >> my name is hugh fike sr.. thanks for holding this forum. i'm glad to hear you mentioned the high-grade shotguns that the aristocracy uses in england, and i hope that it doesn't come to that in america, but it seems that that's what politicians are aiming for. that eventually rifles and pistols will be taken out of the citizens' hands and only birding guns will be left. i hope that at some point in the future you have maybe a forum on hospital violence, for example. far more people are killed by medical accidents in america than by guns. [inaudible conversations] >> i'm always fascinated that

the first amendment is interpreted so liberally as to include a jar of urine with a crucifix in it, and yet the second amendment is interpreted so strictly that the rights of the people shall not be infringed somehow doesn't apply. in many cases. although i'm glad to hear you say that guns are protected by the second amendment. so what it seems to be happening is that politicians are going after ammunition. they want to increase the cost of ammunition to the point where it's unusable. thank you. [applause] >> [inaudible] >> my name's phil graph, i'm a firearms instructor, i also work for the largest firearms training organization in the

country, probably in the world. we train about 40,000 per year. we have a standing offer that any administrator or any schoolteacher who would like to be train bed can come to our program for four days. we guarantee we'll turn them out with more skill than 90 percent of police and 90 percent of military. i say that from experience. there is one common factor, and, mike, i've got a letter that you didn't get yet because it was hot off the presses if somebody would give it to you from dr. ignatius piazda who is the founder and ceo of that company. the common factor we see in these sad instances, more than sad instances, they're heart rending, is psychotropic drugs. virtually every one of these maniacs was either on drugs or coming off of drugs leaving them in a homicidal, suicidal condition, and then it's a matter of what tools do they get their hands on, whether it be guns, bomb, what might it be, they'll do it. who are the first responders? i hear people talking about the

victims. i have a different category. there's victims, and there's intended victims. victims are people who have been disarmed and cannot defend themselves. intended victims are people who have a fighting chance to fight back. there's a saying, dial 911 and die. steve, your boys are the best there are, i know a lot of them, they're great people. but they can't get there faster than of 0 miles per hour -- 60 miles per hour. i'd rather having my bullet getting there 900 feet per second. >> thank you. [applause] >> where did you get the information on the drugs? >> it's something that we've researched at front side. i don't personally have it. i think there are some other speakers -- >> well, the reason i asked is because in all three forums now, this has been brought up, and almost very verbatim. and i have a handout i've been given in the last two, and we tried to run that out, and we

can't find any information on that. and so i'm not sure how some folks can randomly get that and yet we can't. >> well, you've issued a challenge -- >> if you can figure out the source -- >> i guarantee we will research that, and you'll get a copy of the research. >> thank you. out of time. i let your time run before i asked my question. >> oh, you did. thanks. [applause] >> i'm fred rome. i'd like to address the definition of an assault rifle. since they're talking about a ban on assault rifles, it's my understanding that a true assault rifle -- >> that forum from earlier this month, you can see the rest of it in the c-span video library. go to c-span.org. we are going back live now to the daylong summit on reducing gun violence hosted by johns hopkins university. up next, a panel on keeping guns from high-risk individuals, and this is just getting started. >> who, of course, gave that

fantastic presentation just before lunch, and he's going to pick it back up with a very interesting study that he's done looking at many, many, many gun shows. so it's all yours, garen. [inaudible conversations] >> welcome back. i will tell you this, the lunch you just had is a long way better than the food you get at a gun show. [laughter] so this is my topic, and i will say this, that in consideration of comprehensive background checks what gun shows can tell us is what private party sales look like. this is going to be, it's the postprandial lecture, this is the lecture with no data. i believe there are three

numbers and one decimal point in this talk. [laughter] yeah. they, actually, in the original agenda this was the lunch talk, and the very data-intensive thing i gave a minute ago was the talk immediately after lunch. no, that's not going to work. [laughter] but i do want to start with this. we've, all of us have ever sized a percentage that we're -- emphasized a percentage that we're trying to drill in, although there's been no conversation. and you need to keep in mind that something like 60% of people who commit serious violent crime in the united states under current federal law are not prohibited from aguying firearms at the time they commit those crimes. second percentage is 40%. the 40% that we all use to talk about the percentage of transactions involving firearms that are private sales. that -- excuse me. we have two national surveys, actually, one everybody knows about and one not so much.

but they both come down on, basically, that same point, that approximately 60 -- approximately 40% of all firearms transfers in the united states involve private sales. but a percentage that has been alluded to, and i want to just hammer it home before i move on, is that for the transactions we're most interested in, that percentage is not too high as some people have kind of wondered. it's too low. it's too low by half. if you ask those same incarcerated felons committed -- what, blah, blah, where'd you get your gun, 80% of those criminal transactions occur in the secondary market or private party transfers. so i have been writing for years about 40%, blah, blah, blah. that sentence is going to now be 40 percent of all purchases and 80 percent of those apparently made with criminal intent, etc. so having said that, gun shows. why go to a gun show? um, i have talked to people about gun shows and described

them as something just remotely akin to zoos. not that way. it's this: if you want to see a wide array of animal behavior up close, concentrated and easily observable, you go to a zoo. if you want to see the entire panoply of firearm commerce or at least at the retail level right out there where you can see it, go to a gun show. gun shows, um, are where this stuff -- not where it all happens, they're where it can all be seen. as daniel mentioned, we did a study involving direct observational data and some worn-out pairs of shoes and some pictures, you're going to see some, at not quite 80 gun shows around the country. this is the book-length report of that study. it's available on our web for free. web site for free. if we're going to go to gun shows, we need a map. here's a map of a gun show. i know what, i'll use the cursor for a pointer. [laughter]

some gun shows are held indoors and some out, but basically, they're all the same. they have a perimeter. um, there are people walking around. some of the people walking around represented by these black dots are carrying firearms, and in most cases they are carrying those firearms and offering them for sale, and you'll see that in just a second. other people are not carrying firearms for sale and may or may not be interested in buying. somewhere just right inside the entrance is often times where this most inform alibiing and selling congregates, as you'll see in just a moment. and within the gun show are people, vendors of various types who rent table space in order to offer their wares for sale. and here in the -- yeah, it still looks kind of orange -- orange squares would be a federally-licensed retailer, somebody who's a gun store in a truck, and they set up shop. typically smaller in scale

represented by these green tables, square ors, but not always smaller, to tell you the triewpt, are the private party people, the people who say i'm not in the business, i'm just augmenting my collection, and enhancing is the verb. and then there are people who sell other things; ammunition, clothing, food. if you like jerky, you're in -- [laughter] all right. let's take a look. so this is the entrance. this is, um, i think probably or was the largest open-air market for the free trade of firearms in the world, at least in the western hemisphere. we are just inside the entrance to the arizona state fairgrounds which hold some wild and wooly events, indeed. pictures like this are now becoming fairly well known, so i'm going to move through them, i think, fairly quickly. here we see a bunch of guys just lined up. tease white squares are the pieces of paper on which they have written what they've got

for sale. this guy's got a rifle, these guys, i believe, have handguns, we'll see more of it. here's a guy with an ar for sale, here is another guy who's got something for sale who's examining yet a third party's wares. the buying and selling is just a free exchange. we're still in phoenix, i believe, actually that same day. ars are very popular. we've all read about them. they seem to me, this is just a guy walking around with a camera, they seem to be particularly popular in this least-regulated of markets. there are no data. but here's a guy who's interested in buying. here's a fellow who's a spectator to that who's also selling an m3, an older -- m1, an older military design. this spectator over here or is also selling a rifle of his own. and here with a little bit more detail same show, different month -- it's held every two or three months. the seller is the gentleman on the left, and he's selling an fal type, it's a european design

of a semiautomatic or full auto, but that's not what this is rifle, and his sign tells you it's available for $750, and there's some more information about some accessories and what not. and the fellow over here is considering buying. and in the end he doesn't buy this particular weapon. in this particular spot inside the arizona state fairgrounds, you can stand in place. the first set of photos, pretty much -- and many more -- were taken standing in place on a single day and just turning in circle and taking the pictures. it's just happening all around you. sometimes it's a little bit more organized. if i, if i'm selling and i've got inventory, guns are heavy, i may need some help. the gentleman on the left, this photograph is from tampa, has a sandwich board advertising a rifle and handguns. one of the rifles is crossed out, it's been sold already. the two gentlemen opposite here are looking at the identical text that's on the other side of

the sandwich board. at a show in ohio, i had a guy similarly outfitted who porters, people who carried his inventory for him as he bought and sold. this gentleman here has one -- actually, it's not all that uncommon -- improvised vehicle, he's got a baby stroller with a couple spring clamps up here, and he's got rifles protected by these soft drink coolers. this was in dallas. and as i walked up, i thought, boy, all that conveyance and not a whole rot of inventory. it had just been a good day. within 30 seconds of taking this picture, his wife -- i will assume, a woman he knew well -- came up from behind me toward him, had a baby carriage with a baby in it and a whole bunch of handguns in a box, and receives sort of mid gun show restocking the portable store, and off he went to continue to sell. not all the private sellers are wandering around. as i mentioned, some of them

rent table space. i'm going to show you some examples. this gentleman is also in phoenix. it being phoenix, the private sale sign is bilingual. he is selling an array of firearms, conventional semiautos. there's an ar. i want to call your attention to these conceal bl ars. these are not postmarket modifications, these are manufactured firearms. they are legal. and more recent designs have taken this recoil spring -- you don't need to know what it is, you just need to know it sticks out and makes the gun longer -- and they've put it up here on top of the upper body of the receiver. the modern conceivable ar is about this long. i have video of a guy showing how you carry it concealed to his friends. and the next time the slide comes up, the poster for the conference, note that you've been looking at a conceal bl ak with a 30-round mag all day. they have the same working parts that the rifle does, they're

just concealable, and they're legal. another transaction that, actually, in this case did not go through to fruition, the duke looks on as a couple of young men negotiate the possible purchase of a firearm from an ffl, from a licensed retailer. but they're specifically looking at these two ars down here at the bottom which apart from the regular inventory of the retailer are being offered at private sale for $2600. lord only knows what the price of those rifles would be today. it's probably doubled. it is legal for an ffl to be simultaneously and in the same place operating as a licensed retailer and as a private party. i want to preface this, my talk about this with this statement. i really believe this to be true. i think it is true that the great majority of private parties who sell firearms through this legal process -- as

i think is true of the great majority of licensed retailers -- have no interest whatsoever in furnishing firearms for criminal purposes. i really believe that. i'm not manging that up. -- making that up. but it's equally clear to me that there are some who don't care, there are some who actively solicit criminal business. i know of where i speak about this. this is one of those times you just don't quite get the camera ready. so this is a picture from earlier in the day and slightly later. these four men have been cruising the gun show in phoenix buying from everybody they could buy from. they were almost out of money, and today approached the retailer in the upper left -- i'm sorry, they approached the private party, the seller in the upper left x they negotiated the purchase price of a semiauto. no one among them had enough money to make the purchase, but they did when they pooled their cash. so this gentleman -- and they were partly encumbered as they

were pooling by the guns and the magazines that they had already acquired that day. this vendor sold that gun to the group of them, no waiting period, no background check, blah, blah, blah. and as they walked out before them with six handguns and as many magazines as they could carry, as they're walking out and i'm following them, between me and them stepped two phoenix gang officers in tactical gear following these two gentlemen out shaking their heads saying they're just going to take them out on the street and sell them. and i have learned that the modern equivalent of running out of film at a critical moment is having your memory chip fill up at a critical moment. so i don't have those pictures. we did a formal comparative study. we looked at shows in california which regulates private party sales, as i've described, which also separately regulates gun shows, um, puts undercover cops in gun shows and everybody knows it. their really boring -- they're really boring from my

perspective. and we compared shows in california to shows in four states that have none of those regulations. two of them are next door, and all four of them are important sources -- they are the four leading sources other than california itself of guns used in crime in the california. and you have already seen the conclusions. basically, the shows differed in that the things that you're not allowed to do in california didn't happen in california, but you're allowed to do those things in other places; private party sales, rapid fire, rapid sequence purchasing and so on. and those things happen all the time. there was one finding that had not occurred to me to expect that emerged from the observational work, and that was something that i don't mean this geographically. we might call it diffusion of benefit. on a per-hour of observation, i was the observer. o on a per-hour of observation time, i totaled up how frequently did i observe straw purchases by state and so on. straw purchases which, um, mayor bloomberg accurately

described -- he might be the only living mayor who can accurately deserve straw purchases, that man deserves all the praise you give him -- they're illegal everywhere under federal law, but they were much more common in states that don't do much at gun shows than in the state that does. now, this study and some other work generated some publicity, and i heard that free market, that open-air market that i have shown you pictures of had, basically, closed. the promoter was saying he can't sell guns there. so i went back, and this time i'm shooting video, and these are stills from are video so they're not as clear, but with, indeed, there are barriers with absolutely no gun sales in this area signs, but everybody is congregated about 150 feet away up against the building. all they did was relocate about a 30-second walk. have not been back there since. but the other thing tapped was in the, and janie was kind enough to mention. as our project was sort of maturing and winding down, the

office of the mayor of the city of new york sent a team of private detectives out, and we talked cameras and how to avoid detection. and talked about some gun shows they might want to go to. i'm one guy walking around with a camera. these people were pros, and i had some rules of engagement that said you can't talk to anybody, but they were not so hampered. and they shot video, and i'm going to show it to you. i'm going to let this speak for itself.

>> i just have to see your id, and you have to be a resident. >> no background checks, right? >> no. >> good. because i probably couldn't pass that. >> have is you been bad? >> have i been bad? i'd rather not go there. you take, what'd you say -- >> 480, cash money. >> no background checks. >> no tax, no charges. there you go. >> because i couldn't pass one. >> five. >> okay. you're sure no background check. i don't think i can pass one. >> get it out the door, and it's yours. >> okay. >> with we're not a dealer. this is a private party sale. >> well, good, because i probably couldn't pass one. >> i don't think i could either. >> that's good about the background check, because i probably couldn't pass one. >> i don't care. >> only thing i do is demand you

show me your license. >> you don't care about the background check, right? >> no. >> all right. >> no. because i wouldn't pass either, bud. >> so no background check, right? >> right. >> good, because i probably couldn't pass one. no background check. >> no. >> all right, good. i probably couldn't pass one. [laughter] one of those things, you know? >> i hear ya, yeah. >> all right. >> let's do it. >> no background check because -- >> you get the idea. now, what they did was -- can you get my powerpoint back? thanks. they did some prescreening. this was -- [inaudible] they identified retailers that they thought were engaged in the business, so they selectively targeted retailers which is important to mention, because two-thirds of the retailers they targeted failed what they call an integrity test. but it's a highly selective

population. so much for a focus on gun shows. i'd like the take a step back and remind us of all the following things: gun shows account for a small proportion of all sales. take my word for it, i've been getting the high sign about time, and i'm just going to motor on. most sales at gun shows are made by licensed retailers. we have survey data from more than one study to support this, and that, simply doing the math, mean private party sales at gun shows have to be a smaller proportion yet of all gun sales in the united states, and we also know from atf investigations that licensed retailer ors are the primary source of crime-involved guns from gun shows. so what does that mean? it means this. i would like to declare that today -- i'm going to just do it and go home and feel good about it -- today is the day we stop talking about closing the gun show loophole as the solution to regulating private party sales.

closing the loophole will not take care of private party sales because most of them occur elsewhere. closing the gun show loophole won't even take care of the problems associated with gun shows because most of the bad stuff involves licensed retailers and not private parties. and i'm going to stick to my time and give you one last thing real quickly. i mentioned earlier that i sometimes draw an analogy between gun shows and zoos. it occurred to me that it may be starting to be time for me to draw an analogy between gun shows and museums. i am new to this, i'm just going to show you an example, but i didn't want see it being covered elsewhere -- i didn't see it being covered elsewhere. i want to talk just for a second about gun selling on the internet. ..

which i can do and here's the list of handguns available from the private party sellers in maryland. down at the bottom i see something that strikes my interest in likely bonnet and up comes a fairly long description

of a scorpion semi-automatic handgun. effuse cold down there is a picture at the bottom on the same page. the price is highlighted for me at $600 reminds me this is a private party sale and this is a convenient seller about him. go down further i see another picture of the gun, another contact with seller button. i will go this far. i see the message where i can send an e-mail and gives me some terms of use and so forth. this particular gun is a 32 caliber, sort of scary looking but if i were a serious bad guy i would have no interest in this. but it proves the point. i could meet this guy anyplace, my house, his house, mcdonald's. it doesn't matter. nobody's going to know.

thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you. i'm going to be giving the next presentation where i'm going to be talking again the general theme is keeping guns from criminals. the role of university background checks and accountability to read notice my terminology, seller, accountability. i like that people talk about gun control, gun restriction, what ever. to me what we lack in this country is any form of accountability in the firearms laws and that is the direction we should be headed in our thinking going forward. several coauthors for this talk.

want to start with some weaknesses that we have been talking about in the current federal law. of course the private show loophole, a private seller loophole, pardon me. other weaknesses however we talk less about is we have a lot laws that protect licensed gun dealers from inspections, from license prosecutions, lawsuits, he and even general embarrassment by hiding the data about the number of guns connected to different dealers and there is an enormous disparity. some gun dealers sell more guns that end up in the hands of criminals than to other licensed dealers. we also have no system of licensing and registration for gun owners.

and importantly, and this is something i don't think it's talked about much, is even the requirement to report if your gun has been stolen or lost. the reason that's relevant, and this is where it gets to the general notion of accountability. if the gun that you purchased subsequently is recovered from a criminal, you can simply say let's see, i guess that the u.n. must have been stolen. people that do the investigations find it very helpful when they have something they can charge people with that the at least didn't go to the procedures to report their gun has been stolen. darren he alluded to this held guns get stolen. this comes from a survey of inmates in state prisons who have committed the -- the reason they are in jail this because

they committed a crime with a handgun. roughly as darren said, roughly 80% attain their firearm through a transaction in all likelihood was not regulated. there was no requirement for background check system. the last two columns in the table will get those that were and were not legally prohibited when they made their acquisition with a handgun. what i find particularly interesting -- and again, i think it often isn't discussed or considered, is that even those who are not prohibited, the vast majority find it advantageous to acquire their handguns in some transaction that would not be documented. so, in addition to thinking about the idea of accountability in the systems, it's not only to identify those that are prohibited from being able to access the gun, but it's also a

measure of accountability of the gun turns up in crime that if you can connect that to an individual, i think that individual will be more careful about whether he uses a gun in crime or transfers it to someone who might use it in crime. so, there are linkages between the more formal and regulated market that we think about with licensed dealers. we know from investigations the alcohol, tobacco and firearms years ago that licensed gun dealers are a very important channel of guns being devoted into the illicit markets and it's a relatively small proportion of dealers no matter how you cut the date of one to 5% of gun dealers account for the majority of guns recovered in crime. and some work that is done we know that enormous discrepancy

across gun dealers at a rate which their guns are recovered in crime cannot simply be explained away by some gun dealers selling more guns or the demographics of their clientele or even local crime rates. so there are simply differences in their sales practices that make some dealers target's four i think kind the term bad guy magnets. we also know from some research that we've done, and i think that yon will cover this a little in his talk next undercover stings with a gun dealers that have traces to crime find a blatantly illegal sales from those dealers. so we know a federal system lacks a lot in terms of accountability. thankfully we at least have some states that do go further trying to have a system of

accountability. they do have universal background checks, permit to permit the licensing. rather than simply go to your friendly gun dealer and pulled out a form and say i will take one of these and two of these, you go to a law enforcement agency where you are photographed, fingerprinted, and if you think about the situation of the straw purchaser, far easier to recruit somebody to make an illegal sale if you don't have to first go to the law in force the agency to get a permit. there are also firearm registries that have been diluted to earlier, mandatory theft and lost reporting. while the federal government licensed firearms dealers, some states also require their own licensing and regulations, which is important because as i eluted to before, the federal laws are written to the dealers to reduce

accountability. also, an antitrafficking policy is the notion of one gun per person, per month to prevent bulk sales the traffickers might prefer. and the last thing i will mention is it is important to remember when you look at the state law in the majority of cases the only are placing these additional accountability measures on handguns and it's a far even less regulated environment. so we take you quickly through a few studies that we've done that i think shows some very consistent patterns with firearms selzer accountability measures and the diversion of guns to criminals. the first one we published in 2009 was a study where we took the atf data from the 54 cities that had done comprehensive

trace practices, had been in place in those cities. we looked at the state gun laws and we did a survey of state and local agencies to see what practices they engaged with respect to the oversight of licensed gun dealers and we did some regression analysis we control for a number of factors including other state done laws, gun ownership proxy's and the proximity to other states with weak gun laws. what we found is when you just looked at the states having strong gun dealer registrations by itself, it actually did not affect the diversion of guns to criminals. it was only having those in concert with a practicing those agencies of regulatory audit inspections and oversight of the dealers which i think it's quite interesting and important.

we also found states that regulate the firearm sales, these are actually almost regulating handgun sales, 48% lower level of diversion to criminals associated with that policy. places that have the permit to purchase system of licensing that also offered law enforcement some degree of discretion that they could do not get together replication even if somebody met the criteria if they had other reasons to believe that they represented a risk. 64% lower rate of diversion of criminals in associated with those policies. so this is the cross sectional look at this, sort of comparing state to state. what is more convincing as we think about the cause for attribution is looking at the

change over time. now, and many of the state laws in question, there hasn't been a lot of change in recent years where we've had better data from the trace data. an exception, however, is missouri recently dropped -- repealed its loss for the permit to purchase licensing of handgun owners. on august 28th 2007 they did away with their permit to purchase system and included in that, they did away with background checks and record keeping for private sales as well. so, after law was repealed, you could make the kind of transactions that garen was showing a begun showing or other places. but also importantly the transaction with licensed gun dealers are different because again, do no longer had to go to a law enforcement agency to get that permit. so what we did is the common

indicator of guns to criminals, a short interval between the retail sale and recovery and crime. and looked at it particularly as it related to when the change in the sales practices or excuse me, the sales policies occurred. we also looked at the change in the ratio of out of state gunster in state guns, where they are coming from. states with strict laws like the permit to purchase system tend to have a higher share coming from outside of the state because there is a relative scarcity of such when you have tight more comprehensive regulations. this is the hardest graph i will show you, so i'm going to walk you through this. these are short intervals. the yellow bar is up to three months interval and less than three months between the sale and recovery from a criminal or crime scene. the red bar is 12 months and

then the sort of aqua blue is one to two years. the policy was repealed in late august of 2007. so what you should do is see a change if the policy causes more diversion to kernels you should see a change in that are beginning in 2007 that then goes up dramatically after that, and that is precisely what you see in this graph to read you shall also sees the three 12-month guns crimes should begin to go up around 2008 bigot and guess what? that precisely what they do. they shoot up quite dramatically beginning in 2008 and stay at a much higher level after that. the one to to your guns began if they are connected to this changing sales policy you should start to see increasing in 2009.

guess what, that is precisely what you see in the grass. so we see very clearly and if you total this upcoming you have a more than a twofold increase in these very short sale to crime and terkel guns that said just guns to criminals as a response to the change in sales practices. i went the wrong direction. so, that is no comparison. maybe that is just some national trend and phenomena. well actually it is the opposite. the average integral between sale to crime in the red draft represented the national average has actually been increasing at the same time the decline has been decreasing in missouri and you see that in the time to crime accelerating after the policy went into place.

this is the out of state guns. the yellow graf is the guns that have been sold by the dealers in missouri and the red from everywhere else. and as predicted, if all is going to contribute to more guns being diverted, and you should see precisely the fork in the road that you see. no longer are the guns needed from out of state because the current state governments are making it quite convenient to get the guns directly at home in missouri. so finally i will share with you the data all the things i've shown you thus far were in turmoil. what happens inside the state. we've talked also about guns travelling across state borders to be as we looked at the current state budget policies and fi your measures and whether

they were related to how many guns a state exports to other states. again this was a cross section of design. we used data from 2009 that is posted on the atf web site. and we created a measure of the number of exported crime guns to criminals population or capita export rate. we controlled not only for the state of gun laws that level of gun ownership, the border population in states with stronger laws that might attract the guns coming across the border has always bordering canada and mexico. also, how much out migration because maybe the gun owners moving from state aid to be simply take their guns with them. so, we control for that. if you look at the data in the export rates, you see enormous disparities looking at the highest, the states with the

highest rate of exporting mississippi, west virginia, kentucky, alabama and south carolina. when i first looked at this i was thinking this has to have something to do with being in the southeastern and athletic conference in the ncaa. [laughter] that was my hypothesis. i'm not sure. i will tell you we see california, new jersey, new york a fraction of that at the rate at which they are exporting guns used in crimes. when you do the analysis to see which are most important, you find the most powerful deterrent to exporting the crime having this discretionary permit to purchase system, but even having a nondiscretionary permit process where you have to show up at a law enforcement agency and reduce export rates by 55%

statistically significant important for the policies that we are talking about now being considered is the private sales regulation reduce divergent across state lines by 30%. and by the similar magnitude mandatory testing and loss reporting also decrease exporting of crime guns. something we haven't talked about is bands of what some people call junk guns that are poorly made handguns that are shown as over represented in crime. those because presumably you can buy a lot of cheap guns with not a lot of investment and if you take it to the right state you can get a markup may be four to five times higher than what you purchased them with. so, there were some that were

unrelated that are listed here. nondiscretionary permit to purchase, stronger regulation. we didn't have the measure of actual enforcement here so that may matter. one gun a month was hypothesize to be important for the interstate trafficking. we found although the plight estimate was suggested in the 19% reduction it wasn't statistically significant. i wanted to end with a little bit of data looking at the guns that recovered in mexico and look at the set of laws for the states bordering mexico city's border mexico, california, new mexico and texas, and the last three that i mentioned have none of laws of interest, sorry, i went too fast. however, california does

licensed gun dealers and allow inspections. they have penalties for not conducting background checks. they do regulate private transactions with handguns and ban assault weapons which are important with respect to the mexican cartels and also have one gun per customer per month. so, what is the export into mexico look like? sort of as you might expect. california doesn't export that many guns per capita as to arizona, new mexico and texas. briefly limitations of the steadies' most were cross sectional kind of comparisons. in some cases we didn't have the individual trace data that i would love to have, but are hard to come by because of the

restrictions. and i guess the most important thing is the uncertain relationship between whether reducing diversions will actually lead to reductions in gun violence. i've got to think personally that if you have fewer guns going to criminals, that ultimately you will be able to have lower rates of gun violence. so i think as far as the policy implications, permit to purchase licensing and universal background checks clearly study after study seem to divert, excuse me, redos the diversion of guns to criminals less talked about but more important are the theft and lost reporting jump the gun bans as well as the dealer regulation that is key in at least some of our findings indicate doing a better job of regulation and oversight would greatly reduced version

diversion. jon vernick is going to talk about the policies relevant to curtail risky practices of gun dealers. [applause] >> thank you. ayaan jon vernick co-director of the research here at hopkins and as daniel said, i will be talking about curtailing the dangerous sales practices, and daniel is my co-author on this. it may be a surprising sort of truism people don't think clearly about always that nearly all crime guns in the united states that ultimately get used in crime were first sold by a

licensed gun dealer. does that mean that they are all bad? absolutely not. i agree with garen but not all gun owners are. anthony braga and others have generated that about 1% of the licensed gun dealers in the united states are responsible for more than half of the guns traced to crime and has said, garen has said that isn't explained by the sales volume or location. win on a state that statistic and my students or to others, i usually say it sounds like a would be bad news. there are a small number of dealers out there that are supplying a lot of guns to criminals but we might think of it as sort of good news. it means if we can focus enforcement efforts on a relatively small number of dealers, we might have the opportunity for very substantial

payout. the flip side of that is in the studies done by susan sorensen and also by garen as well, more broadly to survey the gun dealers and ask them are you willing to make a sale under conditions that might seem questionable that sound like a straw purchases anywhere from 20 to 50% of them are willing to say yes. and anthony braga has taught us that in 80 trafficking investigations, the largest single source of trafficking is gun dealers. so as said, if you are in the business of selling guns in the united states, you have to have -- you have to have a license from the federal government and ffl. there are about 55,000 licensed gun dealers in the u.s.. some states as daniel mengin

also require a state license. how many states in the u.s. require the person that cuts your hair is licensed and increasingly i will admit a legend form of licensing for me. but how many states require a cosmetologist to be licensed? the answer is all of them. how many states require a gun dealer licensing? 17 states in the district of columbia q. can see them distributed here in wide swaths of the country that they have no licensing requirements. well why should you care if the state licensed gun dealers if there is a federal license? the existence of a state license gives local law enforcement and state law enforcement some leverage they can apply if the states are able to inspect the

dealers and identify problems they can pull off a state license without having to wait for the federal bureau of alcohol tobacco and firearms to do something about. and in fact unfortunate the at the federal level, those inspections are severely limited. a line enacted in 1986 called the owners' protection act limits to just one routine inspection of gun dealers per year. most are inspected much less often because atf doesn't have the funds allocated to engage in the more frequent inspection. one estimate years ago is the average gun dealer could be expected or could be expected once every seven years. so, not a good deal of risk if you are selling guns off the books or off the back door.

just two states of the licensed gun dealers actually mandate regular inspections of dealers and other states permit inspections will lead to massachusetts and rhode island as you see here mandate. as other colleagues have done we suggest that actually the states that do licensed dealers that have other kinds of strong dealer oversight laws like record keeping laws and to conduct regular inspections are much less likely to be associated with the intrastate trafficking within the state. so inspection licensing of the state level can actually make a big difference. well, that is intrastate trafficking. how about interstate trafficking? well, research against illegal

guns takes a simple sort of cut at this and says if states have dealer licensing and permit inspection, the rate of exporting the crime guns to other states is half that of states that don't have these kind of laws, and again, this points out a problem that he will share about over and over that mayor bloomberg highlighted in the morning presentation that as good as the laws of some states can become the are dramatically affected weaker laws are around them from the laws of the of the state's exporting crime guns and to them mayor bloomberg was saying that 85% of new york city's crime guns come from out-of-state which is why this summit focuses largely on what we can do at the federal level. ..

making illegal sales, the chief of police in conducting those undercover stings, they pose a gang members to make illegal stills. they plaintively hinted they were looking to settle a score, or that they were buying the gun for their boyfriend, if it was a female.

so, having identified those folks, chicago in particular indicted them, brought lawsuits against the dealers, distributors, and manufactures. they were also lawsuits in detroit, but the intervention was a little bit less robust there. so what did we find? basically, the flow of new guns to criminals following the stings, lawsuits and enforcement practices was very much lower in chicago and detroit, whether you looked just that in state licensees or a licensees. it was clearly sent a message to these dealers that it's not business as usual, that your risk is increased if you're going to engage in dangerous, unlawful practices. and we saw no change in

comparison cities also in the midwest, cincinnati, cleveland, st. louis, that didn't engage in these kind of games. so it's not some secular trend that was happening over time. while i mentioned that one of the important tools associated with these undercover stings was not just bringing, bringing criminal cases are doing the stings but also suing them. these are businesses, and they are very recent give to what impact their bottom line, to making money ultimately. and in addition to the stings, the lawsuits also say with these stings, there were more than about 30 mins sensible -- immiscible lawsuits filed against the gun industry beginning in 1998. the lawsuits argued in part that gun makers and dealers could have done a better job of keeping guns from criminals.

some of the lawsuits were dismissed, others were allowed to proceed. but in october 2005, george w. bush signed into law a new federal law called the protection of lawful commerce and arms at, you know you have a lot of power in congress when you don't even have to come up with a snappy acronym to get your law enacted. the plcaa was enacted in 2005. and the plcaa gave the gun industry enormous protection from these kinds of lawsuits. whether they were in conjunction with these stings or not. they gave very broad immunity from liability. the kind of community that essentially no other product, manufactured in the united states enjoys. they didn't provide people who were harmed with any kind of alternative concentrations can.

they even said the law was retroactively applied, depending lawsuits which had to be dismissed. and, in fact, were. and as a result, the public health function of losses, litigation in general, something that we have been taught many years. now, there were some relatively narrow exceptions to the plcaa, exceptions that allowed lawsuits to proceed, the netherlands. and new york city to be vanished of one of those exceptions. one of those exceptions is the if the basis of the lawsuit is that the dealer was knowingly making an illegal sale, and so as mayor bloomberg alluded to this morning in his opening presentation, new york city used crime countries data to identify a bunch of dealers that were

just proportionately supplying the guns that ultimately got picked up from criminals in new york city. they engaged in undercover investigations and stings of those dealers. 27 of them were caught making illegal straw sales, and new york city brought lawsuits against them. 25 of them ultimately settled and agreed to dramatically change their sales practices. they agreed to be supervised by a court-appointed special master that would make sure that the implemented these to make it harder for straw purchases another kind of illegal sales to occur. so daniel webster and die, and others, have been looking at the ethics of those agreements. and the diversion the new york city criminal sites, despite the 10 dealers we studied, was dramatically reduced, 80%

reduction. you just don't see that kind of enormous reduction in the version for other kinds of gun violence prevention, intervention. so again, targeting a small number of dealers that are disproportionately responsible for supplying guns to criminals has the potential for enormous, enormous benefit. but this kind of information, targeting those dealers, relies upon access to the crime gun trace data. the data that tells us which can dealers are, in fact, supplying guns to criminals. and so you heard so far today about the tr an amendment name for a congressman, todd, who added the language begin in 2003 to the bureau of alcohol, tobacco and firearms appropriations language that amendment has evolved some

overtime. but its major provisions today are that atf can't require dealers to conduct a physical inventory of their store as part of an inspection to make sure that their stock lines up with her sales records but again, that they're not selling guns out the back door. the gun trace data can't be supplied to the public directly or to researchers like daniel and me and anthony and aaron and others who use it. and a background check information has to be destroyed within 24 hours. so, for remarkable thing, mayors against illegal guns has been working hard to address this tiahrt amendment. we're hoping we will see some recommendations coming out of the biden commission with regards to tiahrt amendment. and we've done some research that looks at some of the effects of tiahrt. there was a milwaukee area gun store called badger guns and

ammo. and the report came out in may of 1999 showing that badger guns and ammo was number one in the nation of sale of crime guns. not just in wisconsin or milwaukee, but number one even in the nation. in fact supplied fully half of milwaukee's crime guns. so after that report came out, which frankly embarrassed badger, as it should have, badger announced that it would no longer sell the saturday night special junk the kind of guns that daniel mentioned before. it wouldn't sell those kind of small poorly made handgun commonly used in crime. that's 1999. and then along come this the tiahrt amendment protection in 2003-2006. so this gave us a nice opportunity to see what happened first when badger made its

decision to stop selling these guns that are disproportionately favored i some criminals. and then what happened after the tiahrt protections cayman. so all right, i will follow darren's lead as they do in all things, and show you, this line is win the badger sales policy changed occurred. and we are looking at the number of guns diverted to criminals within a year of retail sale. that's a measure of gun trafficking. without even knowing the scale you can -- badgett is the darkling. you can see what happens after badgers change in sales policy, again, narrowed by the trace data. the guns that are diverted dropped dramatically am dramatically compared to the pre-intervention period. then what happens after that tiahrt amendment comes in. again, the tiahrt amendment

protecting badger from the public disclosure from some kind of trace data like this. again, the natural experiment they had in fact natural experiment shows that badger now no longer fearing this kind of public humiliation seize the number of guns that they are supplying to criminals within a year dramatically goes back up. so sadly a natural experiment that doesn't have a happy ending, but we are hoping that data like this helps the biden commission, and others, to see exactly why the tiahrt amendment is so pernicious. so i'll see if i can get us two minutes closer to being back on time here. what does all this mean? well, firearm dealers are an important source of guns to criminals, even if, even if most criminals are not going directly to a gun dealer to buy the gun.

again, can dealers are the first source -- gun dealers are the first source of guns they get out into the world and if it's a straw purchase, it ultimately winds up being in the hands of the criminal by focusing on the gun dealer. we can make a difference to do your licensing through enhanced oversight. we can address illegal trafficking. but there are legal obstacles that persist. obstacles like the firearm owners protection act, like the tiahrt amendment, like the protection of law first commerce arms act. they are not instrumental, but our ability to curtail the dangers practices of some dealers would be dramatically easier without these kinds of federal, legal obstacles. thanks very much up lock dikes. [applause] >> thank you, jon. our next speaker is dr. anthony

who was with rutgers university and harvard university. anthony has been an expert for decades now in law enforcement strategy to address gun violence, and not only on trafficking side which he will talk about today, but on discouraging criminal acquisition and the use of guns as well, so, anthony. [applause] >> before i started i just want to acknowledge that i wrote this paper with my good friend, pete, who will be making some comments after i finish. and a sensual i would making an argument to you about the steps they need to be taken in order to support an effective supply-side enforcement strategy. the basic idea behind supply-side enforcement is that we want to discourage or reduce

criminal acquisition and use of firearms at increasing the price of acquiring a firearm. that price could be the price you pay on the street when they are purchasing firearms, or it could be what economists call the effective price of making a transaction, which would be the amount of time and hassle that they face in trying to locate somebody who is willing to sell them again. you can increase either, the idea would be that they would become is on the time they're carrying guns can using guns and this would reduce violence on the street. one of the basic perspectives of this approach, especially in the current legislative climate is that in trying to reduce gun crime by keeping these guns from falling into the wrong hands, that of the bad guys, those who are legally prescribed in having a gun, while the same time not infringing on the rights of the good guys, those who are legally entitled to have firearms. whenever you look at what a

criminal gets -- where to criminals get guns from, many crime guns are stolen. this is true. theft is a problem and there are other things you can do about that, working with local to police departments. but you do have a noteworthy portion of guns that are recovered in crime that had been recently diverted from legal firearms that you can, i think, put strategic interventions in place that can reduce those supply lines of guns to criminals and a pretty direct way. i'm going to review some of the evidence that suggests that legal commerce is incredibly leaky, and the gun traffickers exploit of the system, and representative port and -- important pathways. then i will summarize some of the research that shows that gun market interventions do in fact have some impact. we don't know whether those

impacts yet translate into violence reductions, gangs on the street but it's time we start to develop the body of dollars because there's a lot of evidence that suggests that a really good. then i'm going to frame six recommendations for supply-side strategy. for atf, in particular. that could strengthen the way that they go about investigating gun traffickers. atf is the primary law enforcement agency that regulates, enforces our nation's federal firearms laws. and essentially, they are fighting this fight with one arm tied behind their back. they need a lot more support in order to be as effective as they can be. now, i'm not going to go through all of the details. i'm just going to summarize through different studies that have been done, not only using atf trace data investigation data but other creative studies that have been done by people in the room. but it's important to recognize that atf trace data in particular, investigation did as

well, do have their limits. for example, because of current restrictions. atf trace data only gets to the first retail sale. in most asian i going to know what happens after that first retail sale, and that's a blind slot interested in what's going on with the legal diversions of firearms. ideally, you want the most time between the most recent transaction and is recovery in crime. there are other limits to the data. investigation data are limited by, it represents what atf agents see when they do their job when they investigate and want to report on, and what they end up recommending the u.s. attorneys to prosecute. so it's pretty much what they know and you are missing what they might not know in terms of that data. but despite the limits can you can use the data to good effect in trying to figure out what's going on, to understand market dynamics and to get a sense as to whether interventions would work. the national academy of sciences

firearms look at the date and they said as long as you use it with appropriate care, acknowledge its limits, and ideally use of data that is generated from jurisdictions that are comprehensively tracing all other firearms, to give a reason will sample of guns that are recovered from the streets in crime that you can use that data to do some generalizations. now, as both jon and daniel have discussed, new guns are disproportionately recovered in crime. this is an important indicator that you do have a flow of guns that are going to legal commerce into the hands of criminals. many of these guns, look at to the first purchaser was, for the ultimate possessor was. you had a change of hands suggesting that not only is moving quickly from the dealer onto the streets to the recovery of law enforcement and crime, but they're also changing hands very rapidly as well.

beyond sales volume as jon was suggesting, some licensed dealers are disproportionately frequent resources of firearms. i wholeheartedly agree with him, but fundamentally this is good news. this is where we should be enforcing, we should be focusing our enforcement and our regular toy resources on these identifiable risks to try to shut down the pipeline's. work that susan sorenson has done and darren and katherine has done, serving in interviewing licensed dealers have shown that the are licensed dealers under tough conditions are willing to purchase abate in illegal sales. that's important information. on average, roughly about one-third of all the crime guns recovered in a particular jurisdiction came from that community. the remainder have come from somewhere else here in terms of search -- first purchases. that the very thing of which committee you are looking at.

from that particular community somewhere like houston or new orleans, much larger. a factor of the looser gun control laws in those jurisdictions. it's well documented that crime guns tend to move from states with weaker gun-control laws than states with tighter gun control laws. for example, my hometown of boston, we have the i and pipeline, i-95 state, north carolina, south carolina, georgia, florida, virginia that generate a little more than a third of our guns. we have another third of our guns -- not quite a third. about 25% of our guns coming from new hampshire, maine and vermont. that are any of them crimes in boston, and only about a third of our guns are originating from within massachusetts. so guns tend to migrate from this week controlled states into the tight controlled states. then as i started off, gun

traffickers and to exploit incredibly leaky system of conference. atf data reveals there are multiple pathways through which gun traffickers divert guns to criminals. corrupt licensed dealers, straw purchasers, the most frequent category of trafficking, straw purchasing, private dealers operating either in the want ads or internet sales, offering at gun sales. you also have organized that way sometimes criminals burglarize and it licensed dealers and take their inventory and then rapidly that inventory shows up on streets and cities. and often it's not, the illegal gun trade is not like the illegal drug trade. one benefit is that you have paperwork on firearms, can chase them and you can figure out where they're coming from. another difference is that they are a durable good.

so you don't have that rapid sale of guns in the streets then you have of drugs. so when you look at the mobile gun trafficking investigation, you're not looking at something that looks like the cartel. the average gun trafficking investigation or at least the mobile ones, involves very small numbers of firearms. at least 60% the last of atf did a comprehensive survey of the gun trafficking investigations involved the illegal diversion of 20 or fewer firearms. there were some large-scale traffickers. i think between 10 and 11,000 but they were relatively rare. so those investigations that did involve gun dealer, on average they diverted at 350 guns, a much larger number to the obvious axes. but what atf typically sees our smaller number of guns that they know that are being recovered in crime. and that's what illegal gun market looks like, at least through a quick, idaho, three-minute survey of the

literature. now, the other bit of important information is there is a developing body of knowledge when you do intervene in gun markets. the gun market dynamics shift. and this is important information because a lot of folks thinks it's futile, that you can't do anything about these pathways through which criminals acquire guns. jon and andy went to some of the research that they had done looking at undercover police stings and lawsuits in detroit and chicago, and the important finally there was a number of new guns that had changed hands, new guns being recovered in crime in one year dropped dramatically as a result of those interventions. and also in milwaukee, badger guns when the machine byte been being shown to be the number one originator of crime gun traces in the country, they change their practices, and the number of new guns that have switched hands that were recovered in crime plummeted also. some work i did with the boston

police department, atf fuel division of the u.s. attorney's office launching a gun trafficking enforcement action against recently acquired firearms, both diverted within massachusetts, from massachusetts dealers, as well as out of state dealers showed that had a 25% reduction in times crime, the proportion of guns that were recovered that were new, with that, the implementation of that strategy. that was different than trends and other similar cities throughout the country. so you can make him pass on these pipelines of criminals if you focus in on them. there have been other studies that suggest these facts as with the earlier phil cook in his presentation on the brainiacs talked about a study i did with him looking at the source of states of firearms after the passage of the brady act. and what we found was those guns that were recovered in chicago,

after the brady act had a noteworthy shift in the source states of gun when you first intimate after the project was first implemented. and when state was mississippi. once brady was implemented and folks going to buy new guns in mississippi had to pass a criminal background check and generate paperwork, they then had, there was no competitive advantage of going to mississippi any longer. so the number of guns that were being recovered from that dwindle down from 20% to 3% after the implementation of that law. so there's a reason to believe that if you were able to launch an attack on illegal firearms markets trying to identify gun traffickers and apprehend, prosecute him, they could shut down supply lines to criminals. unfortunately, one of this, many

reasons why the recent has been fully tested, but it would be limited given the current struggle that atf faces. so pete and i have made six policy recommendations that we think could improve the situation if we were ever going to get serious about doing a gun market disruption strategy and shutting down illegal gun trafficking enterprises. the first, as mentioned many times today, it's requiring the execution of all private sales through federal firearms licensees. in most states there are no background checks or transfer paperwork being generated on the secondary market sales. we clearly have a major loophole through which criminals can exploit acquiring guns to these unregulated secondary market sales but it needs to be shut down. another part of this reform would be trying to improve the

ridiculously cumbersome procedure that atf has to abide by in tracing firearms. those of you who are not familiar with the procedure, when they recover a gun in crime they get the serial number and the manufacturer, they call the manufacturer to figure out who that gun was sent to. they been them distribute, they call the distributor. might be another wholesale in that they have to call. eventually they will get to the licensed dealer who got the gun and sold at retail. they will call them and they'll say okay okay, who did you sell the gun to. and incredibly inefficient system that could be easily fixed without establishing a national registry of firearms and firearms owners, by just having them report certain numbers of transactions at the ffl to atf, and if you're able to do this electronically using a web-based portal you guys

would do some of the stuff that the show on csi that you actually can't do in real life. [laughter] but clearly an important reform. another thing you might want to consider as part of this, expand the multiple sales check, the way that was done along the southwest border states. you can have multiple sales on assault weapons and other concerning firearms. the second policy recommendation that we are making is you really need to enact an effective firearms diversion or a trafficking statute. the two most commonly used, even though there's roughly 40, close to 40 different statutes available to atf in making gun trafficking cases, the two most common statutes that are used are engaging in the business of selling firearms without a license, or falsifying the atf form 4473. both are very difficult to

prove. for example, in the gun report, you have in those investigations were atf agents witnessed and were investigating engaging india without a license relation, they were only able to charge 38% of the cases. and falsifying the 4473 form, they were only able to charge that and 41% of the cases because they were very difficult to prove. any instance of engaging the business of getting without a firearms license, one could just say hey, i'm selling a few guns in the private market from my collection, passing them on. there's nothing illegal. i'm not making any sort of profit from this. i'm not engaged in a engaged in the business in a way that is consistent with the law. so, therefore, i don't need a license to anyone who is actually doing a straw purchase could be in violation of falsifying the 4473, could easily say hey, i had the guns. not quite what i wanted, didn't

perform up to my expectation so i sold it to daniel in the secondary market. no paperwork on the. i'm not sure i know who this daniel guy is but if i run into him i will let you know. no exaggeration. it very, very difficult to pro prove. so there needs to be an effort to resolve much more effective federal statute that establishes the next criminal activity, and also start thinking about what a threshold number of elderly diverted firearms will be. with that you want to read the sentencing guidelines as well. i think it's important that come to recognize the harm that could be associate with ethical diversion of firearms, even one firearm can generate as a point in this room knows a tremendous amount of harm. there's a legendary firearm that was recovered in crime in the city of boston. boston police department did a

ballistic imaging, ma put into the system and it came back the 14 other crimes in four cities, in two states, any one year period. an incredible amount of harm from just one firearm. so straw purchasing and falsifying paperwork statutes should reflect the great potential for harm that these crimes have. and also there are a lot of these, investigating a current license dealing. a lot of recordkeeping violations, making false entries, failing to keep the required paperwork. they are actually misdemeanors and that needs to be upgraded to reflect the actual harm associated with these crimes. it's incredibly important for jurisdictions to develop and implement regional crime gun processing protocols where people talk about this a little more. unfortunately, too many law enforcement agencies are not tracing all the firearms come and not entering all the firearms with imaging. they are not collecting dna and

trace evidence from these firearms. and there needs to be a system in place we are comprehensively maximizing all the information that you're getting from a firearm, not only told criminals accountable but also determine where these crime guns are coming from. incredibly important to be comprehensive in this. very important to create strong and effective atf. atf is underfunded. without stable leadership, often whipsawed by special interest. atf definitely needs budget expanded, it's been stagnant for the last 10 years your own increasing marginally, not even with the basis of inflation. needs to be shielded from politics, and clearly they need stable leadership it i would recommend going beyond making an out of session appointment but it would be nice if something like what the fbi did and had a director position that was appointed for fixed 10 year terms would be above the political fray.

also critically important for jurisdictions to have access to crime gun information. you want to publish as they did before national crime gun tracing report with city level analyses of crime. it was very important have academic involvement in those, the production of those reports, some of the special analyses. and i can't say that enough. the magic between having actual investigators with detailed knowledge about criminal enterprises operate collaborating with academics, but the ability to bring an outside eye, analytic tools, and an unbiased perspective of what's going on, the knowledge that is greater. so clearly we establishing that and also some of the reforms, tiahrt amendment, allowing cdc and in that age to fund a gun research and maybe expanding funding for research would be important as well. so if we're able to, some of these, it would be great to do

all these policy recommendations, i think a lot of the obstacles necessary for effective investigation of firearms, you could think about launching a real attack on working with the illegal gun market. appropriate investments need to be make him less their changes need to be made. and we need to improve our knowledge base upon the workings of markets and what might work in shutting those down. i'm out of time. [applause] >> i'm going to ask anthony's colleague, pete, he's going to share some of his thoughts and experiences as a retired atf person, also -- >> sure. now i'm anthony's good friends. for two weeks he's been screaming at me over this. [laughter] daniel. okay, so look, very short and

sweet. it's not a time. [laughter] -- is not a pun. the fact is, investigators need data and information to identify vendors and apprehend them. when that information rises to the level of evidence, prosecutors need that information to prefer charges and to try the offenders. every time an avenue is closed off to an investigator, a door and slammed. and we are no longer able to access that data, one hand gets tied behind our back, we have a database here that is supposed to be collecting vital information and is full of leaky holes. another arm gets tied behind her back. and so on and so on, until we

are deprived of so much information, all we can do with our eyes is watch the chaos going on around us. so i think the constant theme today is this availability of good data to stop criminals before they have an opportunity to do more harm. so let me tell you a little true story that will sort of bring this all together. this is the way things should go every day. and it going to take you back to 1995, in chicago. a black nissan pulls up to a street corner on south blackstone avenue. the driver sticks gun driver sticks and driver sticks gun out the window and fires into a group of men standing on the corner. a man named keith bloomberg, 19 years old, falls down dead.

by the time the police get there, there's no one around, but the body and some scattered nine-millimeter cartridges on the ground. because of a good process in place, chicago pd except the cartridge cases, and they go to the illinois state police crime lab, and there entered into the network that adf provides its date local partners. stands for national integrated ballistic information network. the data is searched in the database but there's no matches to the data found that day. fast-forward, eight years later 2003, chicago police officers are following a lincoln town car, the back window a shot out. they thought that was suspicious.

[laughter] they stop the car. one thing leads to another. there's a couple of gang bangers in the car, lo and behold a gun, a clock nine-millimeter pistol. because of a good process still in place, that gun goes right to the illinois state police crime lab. it is testfired and the test fire, and this time there is a hit, a match. now police know that that gun that vcs from that lincoln town car was the gun that was used to kill bloomberg eight years before. the problem is that the people driving that car in possession of that gun eight years before were probably 10 or 11 years o old. they couldn't reach the paddle

of that lincoln town car. frankly, i have a problem reaching the paddle of a lincoln town car myself. but what's happened here is police dependent on information and data available to them from the inside of the gun, the ballistics data, determined what crime that gun was used to commit. now they were stymied. what do they do? they turn to the outside of the country on the outside of the gun with make, model, serial number, nomenclature, descriptors. that gun dealers are required to keep in the record, that allows atf and it stayed local partners to conduct crime of trees. that's what they did. they traced that glock 9mm to

a woman named chandra. during that investigation, they learned that chandra had bought a couple of the guns that it turned up in crimes over the years. atf and chicago police officers interviewed chandra, and she said after a while, that she bought the gun for her boyfriend, samuel cobbs. she said samuel cobbs was a convicted felon and couldn't buy the guns themselves so she bought them for him. police new that samuel cobbs was an enforcer for the street gang in chicago. frankly, chandra was in a little trouble at this time so she was becoming more and more cooperative, and she gave the atf agents and chicago police detective that key piece of information. she said that about eight years

ago, two of her girlfriends came to her and said we saw your car up on blackstone avenue at a shooting. but the next day they received a telephone call from somebody and they said if we told anyone what we saw, we would be next. so for eight years they kept their secret. but now chandra was in trouble. sam cobbs, her boyfriend was out and about somewhere. chandra gave the name of her two girlfriends to the chicago police. chicago police and atf detectives go and interview those two women, and they give the agents another piece of valuable information. the name of the person who was sitting in the passengers seat of the nissan, who saw sam cobbs stick the nine-millimeter out the window and kill bloomberg.

it wasn't too much longer before they were what we call slip that individual, and testified in court, and sam cobbs is where he belongs, serving the rest of his life in illinois correctional system. that's a good day. doesn't always work that way. for example, we trace again today just like the gun that was used to kill steve bloomberg. we stand a good chance of getting a report back, if that gun was last sold five, 10, 15, 30 plus years ago. good luck trying to find the original purchaser. we lose track of these things. we are denied information. our information source in this at a brick wall. most likely the gun has changed hands a number of times since then. maybe even through legitimate

transfers where there is records in some gun shop somewhere that could have given us another lead, but we have lost track. the chain was broken and we can't bridge the gap. yet, many times we do get lucky. many times, especially in the case of short time to crime traces, we will locate the purchasing. then it's our job to go up and knock on the door and say we are from atf. conducting this firearms trace. did you purchase this firearm? no, yes, i think i did. what happened to it? i don't remember. these are all things that people have actually told us. and i have colleagues in the audience i'm sure that can verify this. i don't remember what i did with it. i don't have to tell you. i'm not responsible for keeping that information. the gun was stolen the same day

i bought it but i didn't bother calling the police. and this is my favorite, absolutely true. some friends and i were on a raft -- [laughter] this is true. paddling toward an island on the housatonic river in connecticut. the raft capsized. the gun fell overboard and sank to the bottom. yeah, well, it was a semi automatic smt and, looked just like the mact like the mack 10, and somebody converted it to a machine gun and that's what happened to that can. and incidentally it ended up in an organized crime. so atf has agents and its state and local partners. you know, a strong atf is something we need, but we also can't forget our strong state and local partners. police budgets have been cut, and if one in of the system is

tipped, it doesn't help anyone. we have to have the whole law enforcement team set strong the atf agents find creative ways to work around this. try and make the trafficking -- [inaudible]. using a variety of both overt and covert methods. it takes time, takes resources. indians, the case may or may not be made. sometimes even when a case is made, the next job we have to do is get it prosecuted, and then we start up another hill. getting a prosecuted depends on a number of very of -- variabl variables. if the case does get prosecuted, and the offender convicted, we start up another hill. and that is sensitive. and offender convicted for a crime like we've been talking about all day, falsifying a fo

form, dealing without a license, and i doubt that even today when a person is charged with those types of crime that the tragic consequences we saw with chandra's gun, if it was chandra, chandra being sentenced, the guidelines would not reflect those of tragic consequences on what chandra did with their guns and what they were used for. i would bet she would get probation. today, with tools like nibin, the ballistics network i talked about, we can tell the court for sentencing purposes that this gun was used to kill those

people. we can do that. with tools like e*trade, ats electronic tracing system, we can follow again as it moves in a very sets of hands. sometimes following it right into the hands of the shooter. like sam cobbs in chicago. in addition, when we look at countries information collected over a period of time, we can analyze that for strategic purposes. look at patterns and trends. once we can understand patterns and trends, that's when we really understand the gun market, the conditions, the situation in our region. to do all this we have to balance a few things. we have to balance people, processes, and technology.

just like a three-legged stool. if one is too short, the stool falls over. if one is too long, the stool falls over. they must be in balance to hold the weight of what we are trying to accomplish. do this, law enforcement need continued support and resources in order to sustain the tracing of all crime guns in their processing through nibin. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, pete. i'm going to take this time now to open it up for some questions or comments. for anyone on the panel. we have folks again who are in the aisles with microphones.

>> first of all, thanks very much for the organizing all the participants that i've listened to so far this point in my question is i wonder if anyone is ever looked at the financial effects of these various regulations on gun dealers. that's acclaimed i often hear. and i ask because as a public health professional i couldn't care less if the gun dealers make less money, but as a citizen who is interested in starting its own local discussion in rural new hampshire and letter to the editor campaign, that kind of things, i know that something we're going to be. i don't know if that is true or not but i feel like we have to be ready to bond to that. >> do you have an answer to that question? >> i will follow you. >> no, no. , you. >> okay. in california we have an independent licensing system. we have not mandatory but frequent inspections and various other things that retailers are required to do, including

process from all the private party sales. they are allowed to charge a fee for that, and the amount of the few was negotiated. as retailers have been asked specifically the question, so do want to start processing all those private party sales, they seem to be of two minds. there are those who grumble about paperwork. everybody assumes that they would be allowed to charge for their service, and that's wholly reasonable. one thing that doesn't come up often is at least with this, there's likely offsetting benefit to retailers. i will paraphrase what one retailer said. when they coming to do that paperwork, everybody needs animals and accessories. a number of what were the things worse adjusting retailers have to take on, also increase foot traffic into their places of business. and it gives them a chance to develop customers they might not otherwise have. >> i don't really have much to add to the.

i don't have any systematic knowledge that examines the questions but let me say one more thing than. we have some stuff i can talk about in detail, because it has not gone fully -- publish it. at i'll just give you a teaser. watch for some stuff over the coming year about what retailers think about all this stuff, i think you'll be surprised. pleasantly so. >> another question or comment. >> as a constituent of maryland i'm pretty lucky that most of our representatives are in favor of other regulations that we discussed today, and restrictions on purchasing guns that would minimize the gun violence. however, the congress members of other states are not necessarily on the same page. so what action can be taken to help those opposing viewpoints understand why it is vital to

make these rules pass on a federal level? >> that's a great question. and certainly one data think many people working on the political side of this struggle with all the time. i'm going to pass this to my colleague, jon, and let him have a try at this one. >> well, you know, self-serving one of the things that we hope will help is, i was somewhat like this. in the resulting book with the research as it ends, the university has committed to placing on the desk of every member of congress, and of their staff. but you also heard mayor bloomberg say this morning, you can't rely just on the fact that your elected representatives are in favor. you can't write to them and say, your lead, i want you to vote for the projected is right to them and say i want you to use your influence to persuade others to use their influence as chair of the appropriations

committee, or as a senior member of the minority party in the house of representatives. so it's more than just a vote that we have to ask from our elected officials. but we have to have leadership as well. >> i'll just tagged onto the. my own feeling is that to get some change along the lines i think you are suggesting, it's really going to require more gun owners to speak out in favor of commonsense regulation. i think the politicians who feel like they have to work hard for their in our a a+ rating would maybe feel less like that's necessary if they had another group of gun owners who would sort of validate what they're to do, what they consider to be reasonable regulations about firearms. because as has been alluded to

already but we will go into more detail tomorrow, the vast majority of gun owners are supportive of most of the measures that we are talking about here. and i think that's the most critical thing is begin, a politician being able to say that they are doing something that the gun owners agree with because they don't want to alienate gun owners who vote. spent i had a question. i just saw a documentary on saturday called the house i live in, about the war on drugs. and to talk about how there've been like 45 million arrests, and a trillion dollars spent on that were. my question is, what impact do you think the war on drugs has had on gun violence? there's an allusion to the fact a lot of accidents happen in force of rage and all that. but anyway, any thoughts on the war on drugs and drug violence -- gun violence issues because i will try to get a very brief

response to the. there has been some meta-analysis that looked at different anti-gun trafficking types of interventions by law enforcement. they show that more often than not they lead to harmful impacts, meaning more violence. there are better ways to go about addressing illegal drug problem than the way we have tackled this thus far. i think maybe the most important thing that connects to what we're talking about today with respect against an illegal gun markets is for people to really understand that even though some of the individuals might be the same individuals were engaged in illegal drug enterprise as well as illegal gun site, those markets are very different, as anthony indicated, and the data suggests, that were as the law enforcement intervention focus on illegal drugs has had often

counterproductive outcomes, invariably the efforts to disrupt the illegal gun markets has had the opposite. that is, reduce the flow of guns to criminals. so there are different markets. i don't want to go into a seminar on sort of microeconomics so i will stop there, but i don't think people who are skeptical or, you know, questioned the war on drugs to think that oh, that means we can't do it is illegal gun market. i think they are different things and you get different outcomes when you approach it. >> can i add something? >> yes. >> i'd like to add something to your question. when i started with the adf in the mid '70s, and at the beginning i worked a lot of undercover trying to determine

where crime guns were coming from. and at that time i found that most of the crime guns that i was buying undercover were secondary market guns. they were to new. they were banging around for a while. some of them were stolen because they had been reported stolen, and others could have been stolen by they might not have been reported correctly. so in any case they were older guns, secondary market guns. and all of a sudden in the mid '80s, everything started to change. we started to see really for the first time groups of criminals smuggling new guns from one state to another state that had less strict firearms laws. and as we tried to understand what that was, it really coincided with the drug cocaine worse down in florida. and that sort of spread

throughout the country. started down there, but it spread. and as these gangs started competing for territory and there was lots of money to be made in the drug trade, they didn't need to get guns from the secondary market. some gun that was stolen in a house burglary. they wanted the guns that they saw on tv, that the cop said, that the military had. so they have the money in their pocket to buy those guns, and that's what i personally saw the change. and that continues today. because the drug market is robust, as it was then. do you have anything -- i have a colleague over the he was even more up-to-date. >> let's have another question. >> hi, thank you.

my name is nancy robinson. i'm from boston and i want to know, i picking up on something the professor said about how new crimes are, new guns are disproportionately recovered in crime. ..

anybody in the room and? i don't think so. that kind of research hasn't been done recently in part because it was being done to support the litigation the municipalities were bringing. the war are doing as the industry was under selling guns, profiting the sales therefore ought to be responsible for the cost occurring for the enactment of the protection of congress and arms back in 2005 those kind of lawsuits have essentially dried out and so has the demand for that kind of research. >> [inaudible]

and triet >> i was involved in some of the litigation research we commissioned for that litigation showed up to 22% of some manufacturers up to 22% of the guns into the criminal market and that became impossible once the access to the data was stopped. >> thank you, do any of you know whether there has been any effort on the grand scale to mobilize the training or scripting frontline mac officers, deputies and troopers to do more on this effort? >> there was more. frontline training officers to get involved in the market is that what you're saying klaxon.

>> when they take the gun into custody are they asking the right questions are passing it off for someone else to follow up on which had the front line at the front level. i know this happens in some places that make this a priority and it depends upon local police commissioner to what degree he or she makes that a priority. anthony and david both have a lot of experience in this. david is a former atf officials that joined the panel discussion >> thank you for the question. many organizations over time spent a lot of effort trying to train local police because as we've heard today, atf is a very small agency. in fact, atf there are special agents as the phoenix police department has sworn officers

atf is smaller than the brummer county sheriff's department said you can imagine there isn't much local partners can do in this complex effort you've seen today. organizations like the international association of chiefs of police during the time when we have project safe neighborhoods there was much training when officers were all in only trained about how to trace the gun and encouraged to do so every time it is recovered but also learns more advanced techniques to join task forces. unfortunately those efforts because the budget cuts that dwindle there are many training says there once were. we haven't dedicated that effort and this is problematic as most police officers don't stay in the protection that long. they stay in for about five years and then they go on to other efforts so we have to constantly train officers in that that you point out which is a key joint effort.

>> what a day and doing is the train all of their officers on handling a crime scene to ensure they look for all of the possible gun related evidence that firearms, every single firearm gets traced in a comprehensive investigation inside and outside of the gun and when someone is arrested of possession of a firearm they make sure they are briefed on where they got the gun from so they can try to work those underground street markets and find out how they are moving about in the neighborhoods. those policies are implemented by the police department basis. it's not something that is across the country. >> could buy have that lack of standardization of a specially regionally that we have to the atf are trying to encourage imagine a fall of the departments in the region or the state looked at the recovery of a gun crime identically in all

agencies could benefit from the intelligence and the partners next door. estimate the partner said -- >> i have a question for the panel. as the last couple of hours and particularly the last panel was seen to the various recommendations that we have in many ways echoes of what michael blumberg said today in terms of the kind of regulatory interventions that would respond to the yawning gaps both on the supply and on the demand side of my question and perhaps this is an exotic question because it assumes that we would get some if not for all of the proposals that are being discussed today adopted. i'm interested in the panel view of what the dynamic changes

would be to the nature of the gun industry that would then create new regulatory challenges. so, we got 300 million handguns currently in the united states and we know there is a subset of consumers who are going to work feverishly to avoid the real trick of occasions or adherence to them both on the supply side and on but demand side. we know we've got the internet, we know we've got the prospect for offshore purchasers and so forth, and we know we have an even more robust secondary market than the one we have now. so, what i am worried about is the industry we have today, the structure of the market that we have today will change very radically were we to get this first best world of regulation adopted, and then the question is if you only have a moment to

get the right regulatory structure here is what we are proposing comprehensive enough to deal with the dynamic effect for the changes in the industry that were likely to see in light of this package that was proposed early today and has been in varying degrees reinforced through our deliberations. >> i will start and then hand off to my other panelists. just on the first part of your question to bully a letdown, would there be some sort of a modification by the industry that would in essence negate what might happen deutsch the regulations a fight understand why you are getting at. >> sure, right.

>> it is good for the next decade anticipating changes in the way in which both consumers and suppliers in the industry how they will currently operate. >> this is going to be a difficult question to answer because we are not in that world yet, but we do have some evidence from at least what states do that to get close to what the recommendations are, certainly one wouldn't anticipate some adaptations in that marketplace whether you are talking about the more formal industry or that more underground market. again, this market is not like the drug market. yes people are making money, but they are not getting for the most part enormously which and if you placed enough risk associated engaging in that

business, i think that you don't have to stop every such sale, but because the problem is so big, i do think that you could have an impact. i think many of the things that are being proposed in terms of federal reforms where we talk to that id universal background checks in terms of having better laws to go after the straw purchasers and traffickers to meet the pattern of evidence from research that i previewed and conducted suggests to me that it would be effective. the current state-by-state kind of system gives us some impact but he did so much more if you institute that on the fall level, so i'm reasonably

optimistic that you could disrupt the markets and make it harder for the criminals to get guns and there is a wonderful study that was led that looked at the market in chicago and said something very surprising which was it isn't nearly as easy to get a gun in this underground market than in many people believe that there is due in part to the law enforcement procedures that were just talked about the chicago police department really has focused on guns for a long time in a very aggressive way and that seemed to play out in that underground market. i will let garen finish up on this. >> thanks a lot for bringing this up. i've heard two things today that i think we've not done a good job responding to and you mentioned them both we trashed

them for not going far enough. it left out the private sector market and i don't think we know if the things that we are proposing go far enough or not and continuing concern that i have and i speak only for myself is this. have we started training for so long to think so little that we are not thinking big enough? i am capable of thinking much bigger than this and steve and i have heard of radical proposals that i don't think will get their. what may come back to the basics on the public health approach which insists among other things that much be done at the same time so that we don't squeeze the balloon in one place only to have it pop up in another. and i think and an array of complex reactions are being

proposed here that would make it difficult even for a malevolent industry which i do not think we have. we have an essentially amoral enterprise interested in maximizing profits and minimizing difficult for the industry to thrive in a legal commerce. i will point to a couple examples. one is in their early nineties the number one, number three and number five maker of semiautomatic pistols and the united states for all makers of specials. of those companies were owned by members of the single extended family or in one case friend located in basically the same place in southern california and the opportunity that presented was taken advantage of and went out of business in southern california and nobody filled the

gap. there is basically a manufacturer, a small network that operate under the same name headquartered in chicago but nothing like there was before. i don't think that depo went unfilled because the industry will up and said this is bad. we are not going to sell those guns. they were concerned about the liability. this is. the headquarters at the national foundation which i had visited is 3.2 miles. it's a seven minute drive from sandy hook. the morning after sandy hook thinking that that, i went to their website. their web site used to have you know the contact us, their bosses and employees they had a picture and biography for everybody the ceo to the guy in the mailroom and that had been taken down, and i think i

suspect was taken down because their website actually said they were involved, this was their neighborhood elementary school. their kids, their employees kids, acquaintances were probably there that day and nobody is connected the box yet. but the nssf is the industry's intellectual hub and i refuse to have that label as an oxymoron. everything looks at it in the industry knows the people that mssf, and that means every senior executive in the industry is not all that many degrees of separation away from a kid that was that sandy hook that today. nothing has been set but i suspect in ways that i certainly at least do not know this may be yet again a unique event and i

am bringing this up with the tell because i am hoping there is somebody in the room that does have it in with the industry because i think there is an opportunity we might be able to say this was in your yard. you need to help on this one. >> i would like to add to the question, and this comes from my own personal research, 25 years investigating drug trafficking cases and the frustrations i saw in the current structure trying to do that. if we had a format when there was a criminal background check required on any transaction, these photographs of people wandering outside the show's, transferring funds, the law enforcement agent would know immediately a crime was afoot. the problem we have now is to perfect the dealing without a license the case of tenet, 20 times so i can tell you within that structure to me there is a

better hope and a chance to actually enforce the intention of the law. there are some unintended benefits i believe for the structure that requires guns to be sold by dealers. we would have a booming small business the would have to create more. this would have to be countered by regulators with atf inspectors that could go and make sure that all of the people work is being filed. but we haven't even tried to approach this in a reasonable profession with a background check required and at that point the lesson begins. >> that is a great point in done. i want to thank my fellow panelists here for your questions. we are going to take a ten minute breaks of the folks can be back at 3:56 and we will

resume. >> as you heard a short break about a ten minute break in this summit on reducing gun violence. johns hopkins university in baltimore is the site of the forum today. earlier president obama said during the final news conference of the term she would spell out his proposal to reduce the violence by the end of this week but he didn't say whether an assault weapons ban would be a major focus of the plan. where we will have more from the gun violence summit in about ten minutes the next panel will examine high risk guns and dramatic entry from shooting. until then a discussion of "the wall street journal" reporter covering the same issue. islamic the segment of the washington journal we take a look at how your tax dollars are at work and the different federal regency and today we are focusing on the bureau of alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives and to do that we are joined by "the wall street journal" justice department

reporter first what is the mission of the atf as it is known and its role sort of within the justice department? >> talk about the names in the agency the government bureaucracy bureau of alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives , and essentially it's an agency that is cobbled together in the 1970's from different federal agencies including one that felt that the regulation of alcohol, tobacco and firearms and in the past years essentially most is to regulate or investigate crime involving firearms and explosives the federal agents are focused on doing firearms in case the crimes are involving

explosives and so on, the atf is one of the agencies that is supposed to go in. they do very little alcohol, you know, regulation or investigation, very little tobacco anymore said it focuses on firearms, which is why it is the focus of so much controversy because, you know come obviously there is the second amendment concerns, the regulatory agencies and an investigative agency. and that draws them into a lot of conflict. >> the 2011 budget was about $1.1 billion employees for thousand 800 that includes 2500 special agents in 25 different field divisions out there. this is an agency that has seen its name and change over the years as the mission is changed to talk about we always know it as the atf. where to be head of the explosives, and what new mission did that at?

>> guest: well, i do know, particularly the explosives came about because the federal government needed some specialized agency whenever there was a bombing or any kind of a crime involving car bombs or anything the was professionally done or more rudimentary so the atf can specialize focusing on that. in the last few years -- >> is that post 9/11? spec that is something there from before in oklahoma city, but in recent years after 9/11 curiously enough, the fbi decided that it wanted to because it does terrorism that it wanted to also get the capability to be able to investigate explosives. succumbing you now have a duplication in some ways of that responsibility, and the fbi have

these high-tech labs that can do investigations of explosives. >> talk up the structure of atf and where it sits in the justice department. you talk about duplication of efforts with the fbi, talk about the leadership structure and where it is. >> well, they have had some severe problems in the last few years being able to get an atf director confirmed. in 2006 the atf has always had a chip on its shoulder with respect to the fbi in particular, the dea and other agencies that get their director confirmed by the senator. so in 2006 they prevailed on the congress to change the structure to allow the director to be confirmed, and that since then they've not had a director confirmed. the nra and other organizations have to essentially dropped to the nomination as a result of

that. >> we can get into that as a segment of the journal focusing on the atf. the lines are open for the calls, the democratic line is (202)585-3880 and the republican - (202)585-3881. independent, 202, 585-3882. the lines are open and george is leading from ohio on the independent line. good morning, george. >> i understand this is about gun control and there is a product that enables a semi-automatic gun to be converted into an automatic operation like a machine gun. why would the atf approve such a device for the public?

>> you are getting into some of the technicalities of the atf's regulatory power. one of the things they constantly face is the issue of the second amendment and there is only so much they can do if congress doesn't allow them to ban a particular product in there isn't as much they can do as far as prohibit it from being sold. that is one of the problems in recent years with the assault weapons ban which is now being discussed that is expired. it prohibited the sale of certain automatic firearms. the problem is when you specify what you want to ban, and manufacturers to change the product to fall outside the van and you have a situation where in recent years you've had changes in product is simply so that they can be outside of the ban so things that are removable

make certain products with certain restrictions. >> let's talk about the regulatory role of atf and here's some stats on the investigation in 2011. atf did about 27,000 firearms cases as arson and explosive case is about 3200 cases and it's alcohol and tobacco to a version were only about 125 cases when we talk about the 27,000 cases what exactly is the atf looking to do when you talk about its regulatory role what are the inspections that we are talking about? >> they going to the firearms dealers into the story to take a look and they do periodic inspections of the inventory to make sure that firearms are being sold but are not being registered come that firearms are not being sold to people who cannot buy them, for example

felons. so you have a situation where the atf, a lot of its focus is trying to make sure that firearms dealers are keeping a proper records to make sure that firearms aren't getting into the hands of the wrong people. >> in terms of firearms dealers inspections here are some stats on the inspections they can at about 13,000 reports of violations or about 1,652, and that resulted in the revoking of firearms licenses for about 71. there's been some criticism though that there's about 60,000 retail gun dealers around the country and they've only got about 13,000 inspections, sometimes it is years in between when a dealer gets inspected to the next time. talk about whether they have enough manpower to do the job.

estimate that is one of the complaints you hear from them as they don't have enough people to go around to inspect all this especially the south and southwest where you have a lot more firearms dealers. but the issue is you have more agents, you have more inspectors going out and it puts them into a deep conflict with people who say that the agency is already overbearing. if someone has a small piece of paper work out of order than they come down with a heavy hand. so you have this push and pull especially with conagra's that obviously controls the budget but it is about $1.1 billion for about 5,000 employees. so, you have read now a conflict whether or not they are big enough to be able to handle these missions and they definitely do not get around to do as many inspections as they

would like. >> host: brian is waiting for massachusetts on the republican line. good morning, brian. go ahead. >> caller: yes i would like to ask the gentleman about the alcohol side of things. when the manufacturers and say puerto rico or in kentucky or something like this, do they collect the tax at the point or is the tax collected at the liquor store and you have any numbers for the amount of tax that is collected? thank you. >> guest: i do not. there is a small portion that still remains over the treasury department, but we believe that the money goes to treasury. atf is still very small, very

small portion of the work is involved. >> some stats from the website on fiscal 2011 numbers. they recommended defendant's for prosecution in alcohol and tobacco cases about 213 recommended for prosecution. they seized approximately 42 million in the criminal contraband and alcohol and tobacco products moving across states. let's go back to the phone. mike in houston texas on the independent line. good morning, mike. >> caller: good morning. i had the fortune of mary in a very wise woman so in a way i am the luckiest man in the world, but my wife pointed out no one had a concealed or carried permit has committed a rampage shooting so wouldn't more conceal and carry permits held this problem that we are trying

to solve? especially when. no woman has done a mass shooting that i am aware of. >> host: we're talking about the atf here. >> these jokers if they just did these inspections each month they could statistically fight the times of the inspections with their dealers. >> host: something the atf can do with the current manpower, talk a little bit about their budget right now. >> guest: their budget has been sort of static. they haven't grown very much in recent years. >> the big increase is a lot of agencies salles after 9/11? >> they had seen some cases since the 9/11 attack. since 2000i believe they've gone

from 4200 employees to just over 5,000 agents from 1900 to about 2500 so they have gotten some of the increase from the 500 million-dollar budget authority to about $1.1 billion. so, they have gotten some of the increase in budgeting. obviously they haven't grown to the extent the fbi has grown, but it is an agency that feels that, you know, for the work of its required to do especially in times like this when the national tragedy of a big gun shooting you see a lot of pressure. >> what was their whole in newtown? >> they were in newtown and in the aurora after the mass shooting. >> was it an investigation? >> guest: in the case of

aurora they had to send a camera and robot to try to check out the apartment of the alleged shooter to make sure that there was, you know, that they didn't blow up the entire building so they were the key and not one and in the case of newtown because the shooter had already been killed and there wasn't a concern about booby trap bombs, the atf role was a little bit less and was more about tracing the firearms that were owned by the mother of the alleged shooter. so that is mostly assisting in the connecticut state police that should be the investigation. >> it is an unnecessary and duplicative agencies. what can atf to that the fbi can't and doesn't the fbi take over the big cases? >> there is a lot of conflict that happens in these things. often in the battle days which is probably about more than five years ago the fbi agents were

rushed to the scene of the crime to be first city would have jurisdiction. >> we leave the washington journal segment at this point. you can see it in its entirety on the web site, go to c-span.org. back live to johns hopkins university in baltimore for more from the forum on reducing gun violence. the next panel will examine high risk guns and injuries from shootings. >> the panel that we are going to hear now is going to focus more on guns and dangerous aspect of guns and then the last talk will actually focus sort of with an eye towards the future of how to make them safer so that we have less harm from them. our first speaker is dr. edward corey wells. he's a professor of surgery at the school of medicine at howard university, a renowned trauma surgeon who's going to talk to

us about weaponry and gunshot wounds. [applause] >> thank you. good afternoon and thank you dr. webster. the and invitation was wonderful on behalf of my co authors and colleagues. it represents a little bit of a professional circle of life. i was the chief of trauma surgery for ten years at johns hopkins and before i took that position, i met dr. webster and one of my interests to collaboration between the clinicians at public health experts were looking to these problems on the basis of the large populations. and now after i left hopkins i get the opportunity to participate in what is truly an augusta panel and it implies to me that you are a bunch of shakers and movers because i've never seen anything to get this

effectively this quickly. thank you for the invitation. [applause] >> the question is and new. i come to you with a clinicians' perspective against the backdrop against whether the centers do their job and are they doing it better? it isn't a new question 30 years ago we looked at different ways to research the questions when i was on the trauma service, the largest center in los angeles county hospital. we found the commitment of resources to a dedicated service was associated with better survival. here at hopkins we found the commitment to the specific structure and process of care among the patients who were not dead on arrival. we saw an improvement in our own on like to say mackenzie that has the most compelling study that suggests a critically injured patient taken to the trauma center compared to their cohorts take into other types of hospitals have a better chance

of survival. the study that we did, and i will give you a little bit of evolution how i think about this process from the trauma surgeon perspective suggested that among the patients who were not dead on arrival or low blood pressure on our arrival, there was in fact a pro survival associated with the commitment made here on this campus in very early 2000. but we saw no improvement to my surprise as someone that had been taken care of a lot of gunshot wounds. no improvement in the overall statistical chance of survival with patience of gunshot wounds largely because during the second time period, fully 13%, more than one out of every eight patients who had a gunshot wound in essence for dead on arrival or in extremism. the center, blood bank operating room, surgeon isn't going to change doa and those that got out of the emergency department

of life and then went on to die. over half of them had gunshot wounds to the head and went on to go to the ico for the brain dead particles with a might become organ donors and so that information and for our determination of the prevention. it was going to be directed at youth violence, kids at risk because those are the sort of patient that we are seeing coming within the tenet radius of where we all are sitting right now. i was asked to update some of the information that we discussed around 05 and i will start by sharing that information by the service at that time for this one institution looking at patience that were shot and brought to the trauma center from close to 3,000 patients over a four and a half year period ending in march of 05 with the early group in 2000 and in 2003 and the late

group being 2003 to march of 05 which coincidentally, and i was a coincidentally coincided with five or six months after the expiration of the assault weapons ban that expired in late 04. now our database, and we have now have national clinical data bases that inform about demographics and an atomic and physiological information on the admission as well as outcome data. we don't have information on the weaponry in the database and so we are left to try to eliminate this discussion with the experience of those patients that have multiple injuries or gunshots to the head and chest or these particular brazen injuries that may be produced by the weapons but more importantly it speaks to our culture of violence. we are seeing a greater proportion of those during the mid part of the decade and in fact the overall increase in mortality gunshot wound is from

about 8% to 12% of the statistics from the significant increase was completely explained by the increase of patients with gunshot wounds were brought to the hospital did on our arrival. one out of every e 11 gunshot wounds were once we had no chance of saving that patient and in fact if you look at the next slide, this is a story that you see at many levels one trauma centers in the country. if you are not dead on arrival, you have a 97 plus percentage chance of surviving. the post at the mission mortality rate here just under 3% and in both time periods and by the time that we got to mid 05 of all of the deaths on the trauma service over three-quarters of them were explained by the patient is where we had no chance. multiple gunshot wounds, the patients were dead on arrival, coincidentally when you link the homicide data, these are sources that have more information than we do on our clinical database is about the types of weapons.

we incidentally see a little blip in the homicide rate at the same time that we are seeing in the emergency department at johns hopkins this big jump in patients that were dead on arrival or extremists declared dead shortly after arrival. everyone has a confidential mortality and morbidity conference where you discuss every patient that died or have a complication. the service and the department at hopkins is the acute service where trauma patient sar, and in june of 2005, the time period that we are discussing, one week, five consecutive nights you see the attendees on my successor who is the current chief of trauma to the other surgeons the first of your coming and even myself, each of us had a 20-year-old male brought dead on arrival. multiple gunshot wounds dead on

arrival and was a small town. the transport was so quick that patients that were declared dead on the scene this patient was your quick enough that we gave it a shot and opened his chest right there in the emergency department so that we could demonstrate his right atrium. multiple gunshot wounds dead on arrival. we don't see many stab wounds and yet to be one that is unlucky enough for him to find your way through the chest wall and into the chest cavity and in this case the main artery that lead out with a hemorrhage. five patients, five nights, dead on arrival. this is a classic example of the configuration we are seeing in one center but now we have a national data bank with 200 centers participating, contributing to the data, 2.2 million patient and we have an opportunity to inform ourselves of what is happening recently when we update this coming into the murf recent years. stab wounds, this is a story

that has repeated itself for decades. stab wound mortalities hanging around 1 percent. a single gunshot wounds, multiple gunshot wounds they would get from the configuration very similar. those at least one entered the head or four x or abdomen and hit or torso and cause these multiple gunshot wounds to the head or the torso with mortalities from eight to 9% range as high as 15%. if we didn't change anything the impact of the interpersonal violence. how many parents in the home, what television shows, but culture is, will only change the instrument of execution from a gun to a knife year after year as we statistic we would see that episode would less likely result in the death by at least tenfold, sometimes twentyfold if that were the only thing that we changed. and then from the perspective of

the surgeon we see in the emergency department looking at those that were dead on arrival if you look at the stab wound and compare them to gunshot wounds we see the percentages coming into a hospital dead on arrival or a fer fraction of a percentage compared to the numbers for the gunshot wounds anywhere this is nationally. but nationally we see those numbers around 1.5, 2% as high as 4%, still a magnitude of one or two more in terms of those patients. we have absolutely no chance. there is nothing we do as clinicians in the institution to further have an opportunity to improve the survival. obviously this has to point to a new strategy that focuses on the prevention. and then the final updated piece of data using it as a reference

year and the varied and ... the likelihood of death where patients with a single gunshot wound preparing 03 through the subsequent years and we see on most of those years there is a statistically significant floor likelihood of death, mortality down, confidence that will completely below the reference line and we are talking about single gunshot wound is going forward and improved performance with multiple gunshot wounds again using 03 as the reference line. in 05 the first year after and you see all of these centers touching thereafter did we show improvement in the survival of the patient is even though we had better improvements and overall survival of gunshot wounds for the patient.

we don't have a chance for those patients with multiple injuries head, chest and others. this isn't new information for us. we knew this when we considered our prevention community outreach with the police athletic league and was designed to address the culture of the violence. this attitude we are seeing younger patients with multiple injuries and we knew what it alleges were that were discussed some of the politics were discussed in the prior panel's but we knew that this is a generational issue and that we had to somehow involve ourselves with the sort of program that would try to remove this clamor from the culture of the violence and so we did using the police athletic center is about ten minutes from hopkins that included slides, personal presentations, we played basketball after 30 minutes and show them graphic slides designed to combat some of the created conglomeration of the economy looks like for those and

students here at the school of public health taught me about these opportunities to quantify attitudes towards conflict and aggression and we were able to show with a fall of 28 days surveys before and after the intervention that there was a short term improvement in those attitudes and that is in my talking and academic arena prevention outreach added to the conflict and aggression, 98 kids cross 13 months and then i was invited to go to new york. mayor bloomberg isn't here but mtv executives invited me to a video that had an antiviolence fema and i said that interests me let me see that. well, this was about eight years ago. my 15 year old was then 7-years-old but i didn't know much about 50-cent, the rapper

that had this ongoing dual with jarule come and 50 have more credibility why? i told the story 150 times and shot nine times he has more credibility. but does that say about our culture of violence? taking credit by the way being shot nine times. [applause] the video that i salles enrage me to it was the same culture of violence that we are fighting against and so we already had some abc news footage from when they followed us around with a young patient dead on arrival putting a body bag a year before but we could never get that footage today so we took what we had and merged it and you will be able to see which is which

and it includes a 21-year-old shot in the abdomen that survived the gun wound but the facial gunshot wound was the optic nerve and he has a wheelchair around for life. what i asked what your friends think that your injury he says basically i don't have any friends. my sister, my mother, my family. that is all i have. so he has a nice little for life for on his face sitting in a wheelchair is glamorized and the patient for whom i have to kind of get back in the clinic for him so we will show you a free minute video that draws a distinction between that reality ♪

by the time he archived it was too late. no amount of surgical skills will change the outcome. >> gunshot wound to the head, no polls, no pressure. [inaudible] no one knows his name or who he is. he is a young black male shot in the head. >> paul glamorous is that? shot in the head in a body bag. ♪

♪ this patient is blind in his right eye and wheelchair-bound. spec how do your friends react to your injuries and how does it change your relationship with your friends? >> basically i don't have any. the only person i've got is my family. my mother, my brothers and my sisters. ♪ >> the reason i want you all to see him is because he can demonstrate both what you see and what he tells you, probably some plants are more important than what i can tell you.

stat 15 hours of surgery. we have to removed from the glamour from the culture of violence. she was arguing with someone over drugs, going to get a gun and he got shot twice. he had two bullets that went from here to there, through his chest, hitting his lungs and the mosul between his chest and abdomen and virtually every organ come every structure in the top rate to separate bullets coming through. an operation 13 hours and he couldn't even close his abdomen. this is human. can you imagine? that's what happens in surgery. you call things like that a success but that means you are ignoring all the things that is happening with the patient. doesn't eat, can't go to the bathroom, you see how much muscle he has lost compared to that picture four to six months

ago. what happened? >> [inaudible] that's where that came from. he shot me up, tried to leave me for dead. them guns aint no joke. i don't want to be in here. i am in pain of. i can't breathe sometimes. i was and to physical fitness before this happened. them guns aint no joke. stay away from them. estimate this represents evolution of thought. i learned a lot of things other than the fact i'm getting old and i need a haircut. so we give our findings and collaboration's the life then involved in here at hopkins have been the pinnacle of my career. but we are battling a culture

that reached 90 million kids in the time that i reached 98 kids. we are like a mom and pop shops selling over 50 billion. that is why our discussion has to be our job is to inform it with evidence. but the question isn't new, 22 years ago i said that this question of violence is going to touch on crime and punishment, poverty, drugs, gun-control, race. it's hard to find more topics in the american discourse and there's a couple other elements in the room how we look at the perpetrators for years when i was in los angeles we would see articles like this. that's anarchy. a 15-year-old father of two if i need to take it that's what i do. i don't worry about remorse. we say what is the matter with them, in colorado this carnage would have 12 dead and profit "newsweek" to see what's the matter with us complex when the

11 or 12-year-olds, this is about 15 years ago, killed five, injured 12 in the schoolyard, the father of new -- newsweek magazine said i visit him in prison once on. it's full of gangbangers and it rubs off on the way that he talks and walks and i don't want my kids to become like them. i don't want my kid to become mr. or mrs. gangbangers like him and yet the question always comes up when is enough enough? when is the outrage enough that it moves us? the legislative response to these kids and black trench coats that are menacing their schoolmates before they kill them is to outlaw black trench coats. it's about class, not just race. it felt like the death of a family. when we said enough is enough we know now, 6-years-old and first grade classrooms. that pretty much is enough. i can report as we speak the college of surgeons, 20-year-old

statement on a firearms in the span of the last two weeks has undergone revisions. last night to the policy of that advisory group, the last group before the border regions unanimously -- these are across all regions of the country, surgeons from gun owners, nra members alike, approve these components to a statement that i am sure you will see in the coming days that includes a discussion supporting the ban for citizen access to military weapons and munitions. a removal of the muzzle on a research database those of us that have the grants that have nothing to do with gun research signified by a signature. we want to anything to support the gun research. you can ask about sexual partners and drug and alcohol and complete medical care but you can't ask about state guns in the house. mental health access and removing the loopholes in the background checks are all the components that are going to be in that statement for the american college of surgeons.

so this little foresight and thrilled to be a part of brings me to this conclusion. we have a backdrop of and approved functions. but this state of injury for those of us to step outside the walls of our institution to engage on this sort of discourse for the strategies and a culture of violence. thank you for the opportunity. [applause] >> thank you. our next speaker is dr. chris koper on our criminologist at george mason university. of really one of the top researchers looking at gun violence and gun policy in his evaluation of the federal assault weapon ban is textbook,

and i'm so glad that you have a joint to -- agreed to join us. >> good afternoon everyone to read the recent years the nation has been shocked by a series of severe and costly mass shooting incidents in which offenders have used weaponry that was previously banned under the 1994 assault weapons legislation that expired in 2004 and that has led to growing calls to review the ban and a new version of that loss of today and enter to discuss america's experience with the initial 1994 ban and specifically i will be discussing the results from a series of studies that all i and other colleagues did for the u.s. department of justice on the effect of the ban between 1997 to 2004 to date i will be

mostly emphasizing results from that study in 2004 but was completed just a few months before it expired. in summary what we found in the studies that the ban had mixed effect in reducing crimes with the band weaponry to the various exemptions the were written into the law and as a result it didn't appear to affect the gun violence during the time that it was in effect but there is evidence to suggest it may have modestly reduced shootings for a longer period. the 1994 law was written year ban that had provisions. it was a ban on semiautomatic assault weapons. now this wasn't a provision of all semi-automatic weapons but rather it was detected a semi-automatic having multiple military style features. adel all listed 18 specific models and variations that were banned and also covered exact copies of those weapons. it covered the shotguns and then

there was a general features test provision that cover other semi-automatic having two or more military-style features and examples include the pistol that has a detachable magazine outside of the pistol grip, rifles with pistol grips or folding stocks to enhance their concealed the threat of bills for attaching silencers, flash fighters on payrolls and the like. in total, the bureau, federal bureau of alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives have 18 different gun models and variations that were affected by fall of the most common assault weapons for those listed in the legislation. the law and to all of the assault weapons that were manufactured prior to september 13th, 1994, the effective date of ball estimates they were probably upwards of one plant 5 million assault weapons available in the u.s. at that time. it's also the important to note that the emphasis of the law was on the features of these

weapons, the old port military-style features the was possible for the manufacturers to modify the features in order to bring their guns into compliance with the law and some manufacturers did do this but understood in this way it isn't a gun ban but rather it is more accurately described as a limited with an accessory. to give you an illustration of the types of guns and features a question, this picture shows the assault pistol which was the assault weapon used most commonly in crime prior to the ban and its distinguishing features include a 32 round magazine that attached outside of the pistol grip, it enables the shooter to hold the weapon under the vara with a second hand to stabilize it during this brief fire without burning one's hand and also a threaded a barrel for attaching a silencer. the other key provision of law was a ban on large capacity ammunition magazines to find

them holding more than ten rounds of ammunition. .. nonmilitary style semiautomatic before -- weapons and that manufactured and sold with high capacity magazines. in fact about 18% civilian owned -- that part of the ban had the potential to affect a lot more guns and more gun crimes. now with assault weapons, all the magazines manufacturing

prior to the law were exempted. estimates now precise they suggest there may have been something on the order to 25 to 50 million magazine in the circulation under the u.s. it was possible for importers to continue to importing them to the country 4.8 million large capacity magazines were imported in to the u.s. between 1995 and 2002. and another 42 million had been approved for importation according to the data atf. the grandfathering provisions had major implications how it would have been over the time. despite the the noted ryety. they were used in a small percentage. about 2% of the -- a number of reasons many of the ban models were rifles which are used in crime much less chonly than

handguns. some of them are foreign weapons when which already prohibited from importation in to the country due to 1989 federal executive order. and assault weapons tend to be less expensive and concealable than the types of handguns frequently used in crime. when you look at the ones used in crime were assault pistol as opposed to the asuit rifle. estimates suggest that up to a quarter of crime guns were semiautomatic prior to the ban. assault weapons and other guns with large something zones seem to be heavily represented in mass shooting incidents particularly severe ones and in murder of police. in the 1994 law spurred in large part because of the number of -- occurred in the 1980s and early 1990s. now in our study of the bans

impact, we looked at the variety of it things. we examined how the ban effected the general availability of the guns in magazines looking at prices, production, and importation. today i want to focus on the two key bottom line issues which were first how the ban effected trends in crimes with a assault weapons in large capacity magazines and how in turn that effected trends in gun violence in the gun. the look how it effected use of assault weapons. we able to analyze guns recovered by police and national data that on guns recovered by police around the nation and atf or investigating gun tracing. studying it large magazine it's difficult. there's no national data source with the information and most of the police department we exangted throughout the course of the work did not maintain magazine data in the gun recovery data bases.

it was possible nonetheless to gather data on the use of the magazine in four cities spread around the country. in looking how the ban affected gun violence. we did not expect the ban to reduce the level of gun crime in the country because offenders who could not get assault weapons could commit crip crimes with splawler magazines. by forcing that institution we thought it might able to reduce shootings by reducing the number of shots firing gun attacks. and thus potentially reducing the number of people shot per incident and the number sustaining multiple wounds. in looking at this, we were really trying to look at the more generally effect it is might have on gus violence. we weren't focusing on the mass of shootings wither trying to determine if a law like this could have broader more generally effects on gun crime that were december earnble. in term of the key finding. we found clear indication that the use of assault weapons

declined after the ban in effect. it shows results from the six cities we examined they baltimore maryland, and for each of the city you can see the percentage of guns recovered by police in the preban period and also in the post ban period. the sample of guns we looked at varied slightly. we'll get to the details. the bottom line you can see here in each of the cities assault weapons represented a small charge prior to the ban and the share declined after the ban went in to effect. by typical athird or more across the locations. we found patterns consistent with this in the analysis of the national atf gun traition data. it's more difficult to explain and interpret. they were consistent with what you see in the table. other finders we have that assault weapons were becoming rare as the years passed. we found the drop until the use

of assault weapons was driven primarily by a reduction in the use assault pistol. it didn't appear to be offset in any major way of institution by post ban modeled models. however, we also found that the reduction in the use of assault weapons was offset through at least the late 1990s by steady or rising use of other semialms equipped with large capacity magazines. it shows data from the four cities we were able to exam the magazine use it. it shows data for -- selected preban years. you can see in each of the three locations there's no evidence of the decline certainly through the late 1990s, even if you look at lou louisville kentucky. there's no indication of a major drop there. indeed it was not clear that the use of the magazines had declined by the 1990. if you look at the top row, it's

for guns associated with violent crimes in baltimore and percentage of guns that had a large magazine at 14% in 1993, this went up to 15 % 5% in 1998 and after dipping far few years it bounced to 15.7 in 2003. overall based on the analysis we could not conclude that the use of large capacity magazines had been reduced for much of the post ban period, obviously this must have been due to the immense stock of grandfathered magazines perhaps bolstered by the additional import coming to the country. i have more recently seen data from other cities suggested it may have been changing by 2004, but even if that was indicative of a national pattern suggested the ban took many years to begin having a substantial effect on the use of these magazines. further juxtaposition these trends against one this chart

has data from baltimore and milwaukee for the years 1990 to 2000. we were able to exam assault weapons and other guns with large capacity magazines. and here the blue lines rent baltimore, the green lines represent him waukee. and the solid line at the bottom represent the chair of firearms that were assault weapons in the city and the dash lines represent the percentage of guns in total that were semiautomatics equipped with large magazine. so as you can can see in each of thesighted, we have deline -- decline. but it was offset by the trends overall in guns having large capacity magazines. it reinforces the importance of the magazine trends. now over the course of our studies, we also looked for indication that gun violence was perhaps becoming less lethal during the 1990s controlling for

the overall downward trend in gun crime that occurred during that time. we conducted a number of able cease look at national and local data sources covering different portions of the post ban period. so for exampled at the national level, we look at trends in gun murderses, the present age of gun crimes result in death. victims per gun murder consistent and other similar measures and far few jurisdictions we arnl to do local analysis of trends in wounds per gunshot victim and the percentage of victims with multiple wounds. i won't go in to the details. in generally we found really very little evidence almost none that gun violation was becoming any less lethal during this time frame. so on balance we concluded that the ban had not impact on gun crime during the years in effect. of course this has to be put in to context with the other findings of the study.

particularly the magazine trends. the grandfathering provision in the law meant that the effect of the law would occur very gradually over time. it seems those effects were still unfolding when the ban was lifted and indeed they may not have been fully realized for several more years to the future fetch had been extended in 2004. now having done that, we also try to make some projections about the long-term effect of substantially reducing crimes with both assault womens and large capacity magazines. and the evidence is too limited for any firm projections but it suggests that long-term restriction on the guns and magazines could potentially reduce a small percentage in the shootings. attack with semiautomatic particularly those having more magazines more shots fired, than attacks with other guns and magazines. one study of handgun attacks in

jersey city during the 1990s estimated that incidents involving more than ten shots fired accounted for between four and five percent of the total gunshot victims in the sample. so using that as a very tentative guide that's high enough to suggest that eliminating or greatly reducing grime -- criming with these magazine could reduce smaller shootings likely something less than 5%. we should note that effects of the magnitude could be hard measure in any very definitive way. the noneless could have known trivial notable benefits for society. at current level of gun violation achieving a 1% reduction and fatal and noncriminal shootings would prevent 650 shootings annually and consider further the cost associated with those shootings. the lifetime medical cost of the assault-related shooting average

about 29,000 and some estimates suggest that the full societal cost of each shooting could be as high as $1 million. that's when you consider the million cost and -- medical cost and criminal justice and wide array of tangible and intangible private costs. considering the cost even small reduction in shooting are worth consideration. of course, having the sorts of guns and particularly magazines less assessable to offenders could make it more difficult for them to commit the mass shootings we've seen in recent years. so in terms of the lessons and implications, it would seem based on what we found in the new study a new ban on assault weapons wouldn't effect most gun crimes but could reduce shootings particularly those high number of shots fired and high number of victims. the magazine capacity limit the most important part of the old ban.

ting would be hard to measure that in a precise way. ly note that features that made rifles more concealable are perhaps more problematic. also politically magazine restrictions might be easier to pass than further restrictions on firearms. of course, policy makers could consider lower limits on magazine capacity for some or all semiautomatic weapons. it's not necessarily anything magical about the ten-round limit. at the same time policy makers have to carefully consider the ramifications of any grandfathering provisions placed in future legislation. now the political and practical realities of collecting, buying, or registering all assault weapons may make it unavoidable. but we have to be aware that it may take many years for such a law to achieve the desired effects if it includes grandfathering provisions like those that were in the original

law. so in some way, age new ban on large capacity magazines and assault weapons could not be a pan say ya for gun crime it may help to prevent further spread of dangerous weapon i are and bring small reduction in the serious and costly gun crimes. for those interested in the full version of the 2004 report, it's available on the website of the national criminal justice reference service. the link is there. it's yes to find. it's on our website at the center for evidence based policy. at george maison university. and shorter version of the report will be appearing in the book we're putting together for the symposium. thank you. [applause] >> so now as i step toward the

future, professor stephen teret is the founding director of the john johns hopkins center who has been one of the pioneer in thinking about gun violence from a public health perspective, and as inspired mentored many of us will now talk to us about the promise of personalized guns. [applause] >> i don't know if -- adam is in the room. adam, raise your hand. i would like to -- stand up so everyone can appreciate you. he's tall. [applause] so i'd like to express my grad gratitude for being a coauthor on the paper with me, adam an

jurnt graduate at johns hopkins university. he's a senior public health major, and is as an example of the future of gun violence prevention in this gun. thank you, adam. i was going to have as my talk a lot of data, and i would describe to you the sophisticated statistical annals i would do the data, i worried that i would confuse daniel, so -- [laughter] instead -- yeah. so instead let me tell you a quick story. the story occurred thirty years ago, exactly thirty years ago on what was then a cold wintery preglobal warming day, and it

involved a young boy who was a public health student at the time. he and i and a couple of our colleagues went down to annapolis. the legislative session had begun. we were going to testify in something having nothing do with guns. but at the same time that e were doing that, a different story was unfolding just north of baltimore, and it involved a family went home. my wife and i were friends, they -- the husband and wife had had baby -- the wife -- mother worked with my wife. and she took some time off after the birth of their first child

to care for the child. but they decided it was time for her to go back to work. she wanted to go back to work. we they needed to find some kind of daycare setting fir their little boy. they wanted a private daycare setting. they didn't want to put him in to an institutional daycare situation. they looked around and they were fortunate to find a woman who would be able to watch the little boy in her home. she was the wife of the policeman had gave them a little bit of a sense of security that she was the wife of a -- policeman. and so that morning they dropped off this young boy, a little less than two years of age, and went to work. around noontime, the woman took

the little boy up to her bedroom, the bedroom she and her husband used where they kept a crib for this little boy, david, to take his noontime nap. so she's dropped off david in the crib, and she left the room and shortly after she left the room, her 4-year-old son entered the room and he walked up to the night table next to the bed of his parents. he opened the drawer, and he took out a loaded handgun from the drawer. for reasons that nobody will ever be able to understand, that are beyond us, this little 4-year-old boy walked up to the crib where david was trying to nap, pointed the gun, and pulled the trigger and put a bullet

through david's head killing him. and the obscenity of the story was just so overwhelming, whoever whemming -- overwhelming for everybody. obviously for the parents of david, our friends, overwhelming for the parents of the 4-year-old boy, who shot david. and i never found out what happened to the 4-year-old boy. he would now be 34 years old. my guess is that he's been permanently damaged and overwhomming for all the people who knew this wonderful little boy, david. so in that kind of thing happens, if you're a public health person, as we were, we try think what can you do? we're in to prevention. that's what we're all about. so how would you go about preventing that type of thing?

and we've learned in the field of injury prevention, the field that daniel and many people in the audience and gairn grew up in the professional lives. you learn there are different opportunities to intervene or try to prevent something some kind of horrible tragedy might be foreseeable. if it's foreseeable, you hope it's going to be preventable. there are different ways you can prevent it. you can look at the people who were involved in this case little david and the 4-year-old boy, and his mother. you can look at the social-legal environment involved without bringing children to daycare and handgun purchases, and who purchases handguns. you can can also look at what is

called the vehicle that is involved, which is the physical on object. when people talk about trying to prevent some of these things, you'll hear different suggestions depending upon who the person talking is, and one of the suggestions, i'm sorry these slides weren't supposed to be here. i got the wrong slide. one of the suggestions that comes from the national rifle association is that rather than trying to do something with the gun, the vehicle itself, rather than trying to make the gun child proof in some way, instead we can make our children -- that's their terminology. it's not our terminology. and a way to make the children bulletproof is by the age old respect process of teaching people, teaching them how to be

careful. in this case, teaching young children so the eddie eagle gun safe program at the national rifle association developed many years ago and has been implementing in schools throughout the country is designed to teach prekinder if they see a gun as eddie eagle is holding up the sign, stop, don't touch the gun, leave the area, tell an adult. that worked, that would be wonderful. the studies that have been done have shown not surprisingly especially for those of you who have had a 4-year-old child, that try as we might to try to get a child to act prudently, children frequently act as children. they act childishly. that's to be expected. so even if you tell them that

you should be careful about gurns, if you see a gun, you should stop and not touch it. you should leave the area, you should tell an adult. the children's behavior not always is that which follows the admonition to the children, the educational interconvenience. in fact there have been experiments that have been done on this colleagues of ours did experiments in which they talked to children and said exactly what eddie eagle program says, and then they put the children in a room and left the gun there. a gun that was inoperateble, of course, but the kids find the gun and the first thing that they do, they pick up the gun particularly boys, they pick up the gun and they're waiving at people. when my kids were growing up, we had a rule in the house that there were no toy guns in the house.

there was nothing that looked like a gun in the house. at the dinner table one night, i saw -- we were discussing this last night. i saw my eld -- eldest son michael when he was probably six or seven or eight years old. he had a carrot stick and he was doing something. and i said what are you doing? he was skull. -- sculpting the carrot to be a rifle he could play with. there's something in the white chromosome that makes young boys do silly thicks with the guns. so if we shouldn't rely solely on the eddie seeing -- eagle program, then are there different things that we could do that would modify the risk? so tragedies like this don't happen? and i think the answer is yes. that's what i would like to talk to you about. i apologize. i'm going to be jumping around the slides because i didn't get

the right slides show here. i want to talk to you about personalized gun. personalized guns by definition personalized gun that by design that is intergrowth to the gun i.t. as opposed to getting a aftermarket device you put on the gun to keep the gun locked up. that gun is one that can only be fired by the authorized user or users. that's the definition i would be like to be using in this time we have together. so it may be that instead of trying to change the behavior of all the children, but it's not even all the children. it's all the people in the united states, the behavior of 300 million people so that when we put guns out to the stream of commerce, when people find guns in the drawer, in a bedroom that

is kept there for believed to be the safety of a family or person finds a gun in the pocket that he's placed there that they don't always have to remember to act kindly and prudently with that gun, but we can do something about the gun itself to reduce the incidents much gun violation. so i've talked to you about unintented gun deaths, and when matt miller talked, the american who -- person who gave the first talk this morning, she showed a pie chart similar to this. it's the green that is unintended gun deaths in the gun mortality data from the united states 2010, you'll see that's a very, very small slice of the pie. but it's a slice of the pie that involves deaths that sometimes are particularly tragic. like the one i've told you about, david. we want to do something even

about these unintended deaths. the question is whether, if you personalize a gun, so do something about the design of the gun that is operateble only by the authorized user or users might you be able to reduce the incidents of the unintended deaths. the answer is because upon a study by my colleague and others in which they looked at the proportion of unintentional firearm deaths that are preventable by a personalized gun. they also looked at some ore aspect about the gun. i want to focus on the gun. they did this using data from both maryland and from wisconsin and a coauthor on the study is dr. stephen. who i think is somewhere here in the audience. steve? over there. an what they found when they

developed the rubric for determining whether the death would have been preventable had there been a change in the design of gun, they found the 37% of these unintentional deaths they looked at would have been preventable by a personalized gun. there have been some other studies the same kind of thing that similarly found that a large percent of deaths could be changed by designing guns. but it's not only these unintelligencal deaths that little green slice of the pie chart they told you. we heard about suicide deaths, suicide being the largest slice of the pie. ..